Dr.  ^eo  Newmark 


A  HISTORY  OF  THE  SCIENCES 
Astronomy,  by  Prof.  GEORGE  FORBES,  F.R.S. 
Chemistry,  2  volumes,  by  Sir  EDWARD   THORPE, 
C.B.,   D  Sc.,  F.R.S.,  etc.     (Director  of  Govern- 
ment Laboratories) 

Old  Testament  Criticism,  by  Prof.  ARCHIBALD  DUFF 
(Prof,  of  Hebrew  and  Old  Testament  Theology  in 
the  United  College,  Bradford) 

New  Testament  Criticism,  by  F.  C.  CONYBEARE, 
M.A.  (Late  Fellow  and  Prelector  of  Univ.  Coll., 
Oxford) 

Anthropology,    by    ALFRED     C.     HADDON,     M.A. 

(Fellow  of  Christ's  College) 
In  Active  Preparation — 

Geology,  by  H.   B.    WOODWARD,    F.R,S.,   F.G.S. 

(Assistant  Director  of  Geological  Survey) 
Geography,  by  Dr.  SCOTT  KELTIE,  F.R.G.S.,  F.S.A. 


Q.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
New  York  London 


ERASMUS 


A   HISTORY  Of   THE    SCIEN 


HISTORY 

OF 

NEW    TESTAMENT 
CRITICISM 


BY 

7,  C.   CONYBEARE,    M.A. 

LATE  FELLOW  AND  PRAELECTOR  OF  UNIV.  COLL.,   OXFORD 
FELLOW  OF  THE  BRITISH  ACADEMY;  DOCTOR  OF  THEOLOGY 

honoris  causa,  OF  GIESSEN;  OFFICIER  D'ACADEMIE 


WITH  I L LUSTRA  TIONS 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

fmfcfcerbocfcer  press 
1910 


CX 


COPYRIGHT,  1910 

BY 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


This  series  is  published  in  London  by 
THE  RATIONALIST  PRESS  ASSOCIATION,  LIMITED 


Ube  fmfcfcerbocfeer  press,  flew  L>ork 


PUBLISHERS'  NOTE 

A  HISTORY  OF  THE  SCIENCES  has  been  planned 
to  present  for  the  information  of  the  general 
public  a  historic  record  of  the  great  divisions 
of  science.  Each  volume  is  the  work  of  a 
writer  who  is  accepted  as  an  authority  on  his 
own  subject-matter.  The  books  are  not  to  be 
considered  as  primers,  but  present  thoroughly 
digested  information  on  the  relations  borne  by 
each  great  division  of  science  to  the  changes  in 
human  ideas  and  to  the  intellectual  develop- 
ment of  mankind.  The  monographs  explain 
how  the  principal  scientific  discoveries  have 
been  arrived  at  and  the  names  of  the  workers 
to  whom  such  discoveries  are  due. 

The  books  will  comprise  each  about  200  pages. 
Each  volume  will  contain  from  12  to  16  illus- 
trations, including  portraits  of  the  discoverers 
and  explanatory  views  and  diagrams.  Each 
volume  contains  also  a  concise  but  comprehen- 
sive bibliography  of  the  subject-matter.  The 
following  volumes  will  be  issued  during  the 
course  of  the  autumn  of  1909. 

The  History  of  Astronomy. 

By  GEORGE  FORBES,  M.A.,  F.R.S.,  M.  Inst. 
C.E.;  author  of  The  Transit  of  Venus,  etc. 


The  History  of  Chemistry:  Vol.  I.  circa  2000  B.C. 
to  1850  A.D.     Vol.  II.  1850  A.D.  to  date. 

By  SIR  EDWARD  THORPE,  C.B.,  LL.D.,  F.R.S., 
Director  of  the  Government  Laboratories, 
London;  Professor-elect  and  Director  of 
the  Chemical  Laboratories  of  the  Imperial 
College  of  Science  and  Technology;  author 
of  A  Dictionary  of  Applied  Chemistry. 

To  be  followed  by: 

The  History  of  Geography. 

By  Dr.  JOHN  SCOTT  KELTIE,  F.R.G.S.,  F.S.S., 
F.S.A.,  Hon.  Mem.  Geographical  Societies 
of  Paris,  Berlin,  Rome,  Brussels,  Amster- 
dam, Geneva,  etc.;  author  of  Report  on 
Geographical  Education,  Applied  Geography. 

The  History  of  Geology. 

By  HORACE  B.  WOODWARD,  F.R.S.,  F.G.S., 

Assistant-Director  of  Geological  Survey  of 
England  and  Wales;  author  of  The  Geology 
of  England  and  Wales,  etc. 

The  History  of  Anthropology. 

By  A.  C.  HADDON,  M.A.,  Sc.D.,  F.R.S.,  Lec- 
turer in  Ethnology,  Cambridge  and  Lon- 
don; author  of  Study  of  Man,  Magic  and 
Fetishism,  etc. 

The  History  of  Old  Testament  Criticism. 

By  ARCHIBALD  DUFF,  Professor  of  Hebrew 
and  Old  Testament  Theology  in  the  United 


College,  Bradford;  author  of  Theology  and 
Ethics  of  the  Hebrews,  Modern  Old  Testament 
Theology,  etc. 

The  History  of  New  Testament  Criticism. 

By  F.  C.  CONYBEARE,  M.A.,  late  Fellow  and 
Praelector  of  Univ.  Coll.,  Oxford;  Fellow 
of  the  British  Academy;  Doctor  of  Theol- 
ogy, honoris  causa,  of  Giessen;  Officer  d' 
Academic;  author  of  Old  Armenian  Texts  of 
Revelation ,  etc. 

Further  volumes  are  in  plan  on  the  following 
subjects: 

Mathematics  and  Mechanics. 

Molecular  Physics,  Heat,  Life,  and  Electricity. 

Human  Physiology,  Embryology,  and  Heredity. 

Acoustics,  Harmonics,  and  the  Physiology  of 
Hearing,  together  with  Optics  Chromatics,  and 
Physiology  of  Seeing. 

Psychology,  Analytic,  Comparative,  and  Ex- 
perimental. 

Sociology  and  Economics. 

Ethics. 

Comparative  Philology. 

Criticism,  Historical  Research,    and  Legends. 

Comparative  Mythology  and  the  Science  of 
Religions. 


The  Criticism  of  Ecclesiastical  Institutions. 

Culture,  Moral  and  Intellectual,  as  Reflected  in 
Imaginative  Literature  and  in  the  Fine  Arts. 

Logic. 

Philosophy. 

Education. 


PREFACE 

THE  least  unkind  of  my  critics  will  probably 
find  two  faults  with  this  work:  firstly, 
that  it  is  sketchy,  and,  secondly,  that  it  says  too 
little  of  the  history  of  textual  criticism  and  of 
the  manuscripts  and  versions  in  which  the  New 
Testament  has  come  down  to  us. 

I  must  plead  in  excuse  that  I  could  do  no 
more  in  so  short  a  book,  and  that  it  is  in  any 
case  not  intended  for  specialists,  but  for  the 
wider  public.  Within  its  limits  there  is  no  room 
to  enumerate  one  half  of  the  important  com- 
mentaries and  works  of  learning  about  the  New 
Testament  which  have  been  produced  in  the 
last  two  hundred  years.  The  briefest  catalogue 
of  these  would  have  filled  a  volume  four  times 
as  large.  I  had,  therefore,  to  choose  between  a 
bare  enumeration  of  names  and  titles,  and  a 
sketch  of  a  movement  of  thought  conducted  by 
a  few  prominent  scholars  and  critics.  I  chose 
the  latter.  Writing  for  English  readers,  I  have 
also  endeavoured  to  bring  into  prominence  the 
work  of  English  writers;  and,  in  general,  I  have 
singled  out  for  notice  courageous  writers  who, 


viii  Preface 

besides  being  learned,  were  ready  to  face  obloquy 
and  unpopularity;  for,  unhappily,  in  the  domain 
of  Biblical  criticism  it  is  difficult  to  please  the 
majority  of  readers  without  being  apologetic  in 
tone  and  "goody-goody."  A  worker  in  this 
field  who  finds  himself  praised  by  such  journals 
as  the  Saturday  Review  or  the  Church  Times 
may  instantly  suspect  himself  of  being  either 
superstitious  or  a  time-server. 

So  much  in  defence  of  myself  from  the  first 
charge.  As  to  the  second,  I  would  have  liked 
to  relate  the  discovery  of  many  important 
manuscripts,  and  to  describe  and  appraise  the 
ancient  versions — Latin,  Syriac,  Armenian, 
Gothic,  Georgian,  Coptic,  Ethiopic,  and  Arabic 
— to  the  exploration  of  which  I  have  devoted 
many  years.  I  would  also  have  loved  to  bring 
before  my  readers  the  great  figures  of  Tyndale, 
Erasmus,  Beza,  Voss,  Grotius,  Wetstein,  Gries- 
bach,  Matthasi,  Tischendorf,  Lachmann,  Scrive- 
ner, Lightfoot,  and  other  eminent  translators, 
editors,  and  humanists.  But  it  was  useless  to 
explore  this  domain  except  in  a  separate  volume 
relating  the  history,  not  of  New  Testament 
criticism  in  general,  but  of  textual  criticism  in 
particular. 

F.  C.  C. 

September i  IQIO. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  I. — ANCIENT  EXEGESIS  PAGE 

Gradual  formation  of  New  Testament  Canon .  I 
Early  doubts  entertained  about  the  author- 
ship of  the  Johannine  books  ...  2 
Dionysius  of  Alexandria  on  the  Apocalypse  .  4 
Origen's  method  of  Allegory  .  .  .  1 1 
Jerome  .......  17 

CHAPTER  II. — THE  HARMONISTS 

The  Reformation  narrowed  the  idea  of  In- 
spiration, and  excluded  the  use  of  Allegory  .  19 

The  Harmony  of  William  Whiston        .          .  21 

Example,  The  Mission  of  the  Seventy  Dis- 
ciples    .......  22 

Attitude  of  Dean  Alford  towards  the  Har- 
monists.         ......  24 

Attitude    of    modern   divines — e.g.,  of    Dean 

Robinson    .          .          .          .      .          .          .26 

Another     example     of     forced    harmonising 

from  Edward  Greswell     ....  30 

Dean  Alford  on  Inspiration  33 

Examples  of  his  timidity     ....  36 

ix 


x  Contents 

PAGE 

Dr.  Sanday  repudiates  old  views  of  Inspiration  37 

Sir     Robert    Anderson    en     Modern     High 

Church  attitude       .          .          .          .          .  38 

CHAPTER  III. — THE  DEISTS 

Socinian  orthodoxy     .....  39 

Tindal  contrasted  the  certainties  of  Natural 
Religion  with  the  obscurities  of  the  Christ- 
ian Revelation  .          .          .  .         41 
Anthony  Collins  upon  Christian  use  of  Old 

Testament  Prophecy        ....  50 

His  criticism  of  the  Book  of  Daniel       .          .  53 

Thomas  Woolston's    attack  on    the   Miracles 

of  the  New  Testament  ....  54 
His  pretence  of  allegorising  them  .  .  61 

Points  of  contact  between  the  Deists  and  the 

medieval  Cathars    .....  63 

CHAPTER  IV. — THE  EVANGELISTS 

Father  Rickaby's  satisfaction  with  modern 

criticism  hardly  justified  ....  65 
That  criticism  invalidates  Matthew's  Gospel  .  66 
And  justifies  Smith,  of  Jordanhill,  as  against 

Dean  Alford  ......  69 

Contrast  of  Dean  Robinson's  views  with 

those  of  Dean  Alford  .  .  .  .  71 

Papias's  testimony  cannot  have  referred  to 

our  First  Gospel  .  .  .  .  .  77 

Tendency  to  reject  the  Fourth  Gospel  as  a 

work  of  the  Apostle  John  .  .  .  78 

View  of  Liddon  .....  80 

Criticisms  of  Dean  Robinson  .  .  .  8 1 

CHAPTER  V. — TEXTUAL  CRITICISM 

Doctrinal  alterations  of  sacred  or  canonised 

texts  86 


Contents  xi 

PAGE 

Example  from  Matt,  xix.,  16  .  .  89 

Dr.  Salmon  on  Westcott  and  Hort  .  .  90 

The  text  of  the  Three  Witnesses  a  trinitarian 

forgery  ......  91 

History  of  its  exposure  by  Sandius,  Simon, 

Gibbon,  and  Porson  .....  93 

Leo  XIII.  rules  it  to  be  part  of  the  authentic 

text 96 

Trinitarian  interpolation  at  Matt,  xxviii.,  19 

was  absent  from  Eusebius's  MSS.  of  the 

Gospels.          ......  98 

CHAPTER  VI. — SOME  PIONEERS 

Comparative  freedom  of  Reformed  Churches 

in  contrast  with  the  Latin  .  .  .  103 
Herder's  criticisms  .  .  .  .  .  104 
H.  S.  Reimarus.  .....  108 

E.  Evanson   on    The  Dissonance  of  the  Four 
Gospels    .          .          .          .          .          .          .115 

Joseph  Priestley  and  Bishop  Horsley     .          .        123 

CHAPTER  VII, — FOREIGN  WORK 

Albert  Schweitzer's  work       .          .          .          .127 

F.  C.  Baur,    the   founder  of   the  Tubingen 
school      .......        128 

D.  F.  Strauss's  Life  of  Jesus         .          .          .         135 
Ernest  Renan's  work  .          .          .          .         144 

CHAPTER  VIII. — ENGLISH  WORK 

Its  uncritical  character  .          .          .          .149 

James    Smith,    a    layman,    overthrows    the 
hypothesis    of    a    common    oral    tradition 
underlying  the  Gospels       .          .          .          .149 
Views  of  Drs.  Lardner  and  Davidson        .          .        151 
The  Synopticon  of  E,  A.  Abbott       ,          .         .153 


xii  Contents 

PAGE 

Lachmann  .......       154 

Supernatural  Religion  and^Bishop  Lightfoot's 

answer  to  it  .          .          .          .          .155 

The  origin  of   the  term  "Received   Text"  or 

"Textus  Receptus"  (T.  R.)        ...       158 

Its  rejection  by  Lachmann  .          .          .160 

Tischendorf's  discovery  of  the  Codex  Sinai- 

ticus         .......        161 

Dean  Burgon  assails  the  revisers  of  the  Eng- 
lish New  Testament  .          .          .          .163 

His    attack   on    the   Unitarian    reviser,    Dr. 

Vance  Smith 166 

Burgon   false   to   his   own   ideal   of   textual 

criticism  .          .          .          .          .          .167 

His  Reductio  ad  absurdum  of  his  own  position  168 

Sir  Robert  Anderson   pits    the  Bible  against 

the  Priest        .          .          .          .          .          .          171 

Father  Rickaby  appeals  to  unwritten  tradi- 
tion outside  the  New  Testament         .          .        173 

CHAPTER  IX. — THE  MODERNISTS 

The  career  of  Alfred  Loisy    .          .          .          .        175 
His  excommunication  .          .          .          .176 

Pius  X.  issues  an  Encyclical  enumerating  the 

chief  results  of  modern  criticism          .          .       177 
Dr.  Sanday  declares  that  "we  must  modern- 
ise"         1 80 

He  identifies  the  Divine  in  Jesus  Christ  with 

his  subliminal  consciousness        .          .          .180 
His  verdict  on  the  creeds       .          .          .          .182 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  .         .         .         .         .         .         .185 

INDEX 189 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

ERASMUS    .....  Frontispiece 

I  JOHN  v.  5-10  (Codex  Sinai ticus)  ...         9 

MARK  xvi.  5-8  (Codex  Alexandrinus)     ...       48 

DR.  WESTCOTT 73 

ALFRED  LOISY     .......       97 

LUTHER      ........     105 

JOHANN  GOTTFRIED  HERDER          ....     107 

F.  C.  BAUR 129 

DAVID  F.  STRAUSS 137 

ERNEST  RENAN  .......     145 

W.  J.  BURGON,  Dean  of  Chichester         .          .          .159 


The  portraits  of  Baur,  Herder,  Renan,  and  Luther 
are  reproduced  from  prints  published  by  the  Berlin  Photo- 
graphic Company,  London,  W.  The  portrait  of  Dr. 
Westcott  is  reproduced  by  permission  of  Messrs.  J.  Russell 
&  Sons;  that  of  Dr.  Burgon  was  supplied  by  Messrs, 
Hills  &  Saunders. 


xiii 


HISTORY  OF  NEW 
TESTAMENT  CRITICISM 


CHAPTER  I 
ANCIENT   EXEGESIS 

T^HE  various  writings — narrative,  epistolary, 
and  apocalyptic — which  make  up  the  New 
Testament  had  no  common  origin,  but  were 
composed  at  different  times  by  at  least  a  score 
of  writers  in  places  which,  in  view  of  the  diffi- 
culties presented  to  travel  by  the  ancient  world, 
may  be  said  to  have  been  widely  remote  from 
each  other.  With  the  exception  of  the  Epistles 
of  Paul,  none  of  them,  or  next  to  none,  were  com- 
posed until  about  fifty  years  after  the  death  of 
Jesus ;  and  another  hundred  years  elapsed  before 
they  were  assembled  in  one  collection  and  began 
to  take  their  place  alongside  of  the  Greek  trans- 
lation of  the  Hebrew  Bible  as  authoritative 
scriptures. 

Nor  was  it  without  a  struggle  that  many  of 
i 


2  New  Testament  Criticism 

them  taadc  their  way  into  the  charmed  circle 
of  the  Christian  canon,  or  new  instrument,  as 
Tertullian,  about  the  year  200,  called  the  new 
sacred  book;  and  this  point  is  so  important  that 
we  must  dwell  upon  it  more  in  detail.  For 
the  discussions  in  the  second  and  early  third 
centuries  of  the  age  and  attribution  of  several 
of  these  books  constitute  a  first  chapter  in  the 
history  of  New  Testament  criticism,  and  sixteen 
centuries  flowed  away  before  a  second  was 
added. 

We  learn,  then,  from  Eusebius  that  the  writ- 
ings which  pass  under  the  name  of  John  the  son 
of  Zebedee  were  for  several  generations  viewed 
with  suspicion,  not  by  isolated  thinkers  only, 
but  by  wide  circles  of  believers.  These  writings 
comprise  the  fourth  gospel,  three  epistles  closely 
resembling  that  gospel  in  style  and  thought,  and, 
thirdly,  the  Book  of  Revelation.  Between  the 
years  170  and  180  there  was  a  party  in  the 
Church  of  Asia  Minor  that  rejected  all  these 
writings.  The  gospel  of  John,  they  argued,  was 
a  forgery  committed  by  a  famous  heretic  named 
Cerinthus,  who  denied  the  humanity  of  Jesus; 
it  also  contradicted  the  other  three  gospels  in 
extending  the  ministry  over  three  years,  and 
presented  the  events  of  his  life  in  a  new  and 
utterly  false  sequence,  detailing  two  passovers 
in  the  course  of  his  ministry  where  the  three 
synoptic  gospels  mention  only  one,  and  ignoring 


Ancient  Exegesis  3 

the  forty  days'  temptation  in  the  wilderness. 
About  the  year  172  a  Bishop  of  Hierapolis  in 
Asia  Minor,  named  Claudius  Apollinaris,  wrote 
that  the  gospels  seemed  to  conflict  with  one 
another,  in  that  the  synoptics  give  one  date  for 
the  Last  Supper  and  the  fourth  gospel  another. 
Nor  was  it  only  in  Asia  Minor  that  this  gospel, 
an  early  use  of  which  can  be  traced  only  among 
the  followers  of  the  notable  heretics  Basilides 
and  Valentinus,  excited  the  repugnance  of  the 
orthodox;  for  a  presbyter  of  the  Church  of 
Rome  named  Gaius,  or  Caius,  assailed  both  it 
and  the  Book  of  Revelation,  which  purported  to 
be  by  the  same  author,  in  a  work  which  Hip- 
polytus,  the  Bishop  of  Ostia,  tried  to  answer 
about  the  year  234.  We  may  infer  that  at  that 
date  there  still  were  in  Rome  good  Christians 
who  accepted  the  views  of  Gaius;  otherwise 
it  would  not  have  been  necessary  to  refute  him. 
The  gospel,  however,  succeeded  in  establishing 
itself  along  with  the  other  three;  and  Irenseus, 
the  Bishop  of  Lugdunum,  or  Lyon,  in  Gaul,  soon 
after  174  A.D.,  argues  that  there  must  be  four 
gospels,  neither  more  nor  less,  because  there  are 
four  corners  of  the  world  and  four  winds. 
Tatian,  another  teacher  of  the  same  age,  also 
accepted  it,  and  included  it  in  a  harmony  of 
the  four  gospels  which  he  made  called  the 
Diatessaron.  This  harmony  was  translated  into 
Syriac,  and  read  out  loud  in  the  churches  of 


4  New  Testament  Criticism 

Syria  as  late  as  the  beginning  of  the  fourth 
century. 

After  the  age  of  Hippolytus  no  further  ques- 
tions were  raised  about  the  fourth  gospel. 
Epiphanius,  indeed,  who  died  in  404,  and  was 
Bishop  of  Salamis  in  Cyprus,  devotes  a  chapter 
of  his  work  upon  Heresies  to  the  sect  of  Alogi— 
that  is,  of  those  who,  in  rejecting  the  fourth 
gospel,  denied  that  Jesus  was  the  Logos  or 
Word  of  God;  but  by  that  time  the  question 
had  no  more  than  an  antiquarian  interest. 

Not  so  with  the  Apocalypse,  against  which 
Dionysius,  Patriarch,  or  Pope,  of  Alexandria  in 
the  years  247-265,  wrote  a  treatise  which  more 
than  any  other  work  of  the  ancient  Church 
approaches  in  tone  and  insight  the  level  of 
modern  critical  research,  and  of  which,  happily, 
Eusebius  of  Cassarea  has  preserved  an  ample 
fragment  in  his  history  of  the  Church : 

In  any  case  [writes  Dionysius],  I  cannot 
allow  that  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse  is 
that  Apostle,  the  son  of  Zebedee  and  brother 
of  James,  to  whom  belong  the  Gospel  entitled 
According  to  John  and  the  general  Epistle. 
For  I  clearly  infer,  no  less  from  the  character 
and  literary  style  of  the  two  authors  than 
from  tenor  of  the  book,  that  they  are  not 
one  and  the  same. 

Then  he  proceeds  to  give  reasons  in  support  of 
his  judgment: 


Ancient  Exegesis  5 

For  the  evangelist  nowhere  inscribes  his 
name  in  his  work  nor  announces  himself 
either  through  his  gospel  or  his  epistle1 
.  .  .  whereas  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse 
at  the  very  beginning  thereof  puts  himself 
forward  and  says:  The  Revelation  of  Jesus 
Christ  which  he  gave  him  to  show  to  his 
servants  speedily,  and  signified  by  his  angel 
to  his  servant  John,  etc. 

Lower  down  he  writes  thus : 

And  also  from  the  thoughts  and  language 
and  arrangement  of  words  we  can  easily  con- 
jecture that  the  one  writer  is  separate  from 
the  other.  For  the  Gospel  and  the  Epistle 
harmonise  with  each  other  and  begin  in  the 
same  way,  the  one:  In  the  beginning  was  the 
Word;  and  the  other :  That  which  was  from 
the  beginning.  In  the  one  we  read:  And 
the  Word  was  made  flesh  and  dwelled  among 
us;  and  we  beheld  his  glory,  glory  as  of  the 
only-begotten  by  the  Father;  and  the  other 
holds  the  same  language  slightly  changed: 
That  which  we  have  heard,  that  which  we  have 
seen  with  our  eyes,  that  which  we  beheld  and 
our  hands  handled,  about  the  Word  of  Life,  and 
the  life  was  manifested.  For  this  is  his  pre- 
lude, and  such  his  contention,  made  clear 
in  the  sequel,  against  those  who  denied  that 
the  Lord  came  in  the  flesh;  and  therefore 
he  adds  of  set  purpose  the  words:  And  to 
what  we  saw  we  bear  witness,  and  announce 
to  you  the  eternal  life  which  was  with  the 

1  Dionysius  had  never  heard  of  the  second  and  third 
Epistles  of  John. 


New  Testament  Criticism 

Father  and  was  manifested  to  us.  What 
we  have  seen  and  heard  we  announce  to  you. 
The  writer  is  consistent  with  himself,  and 
never  quits  his  main  propositions;  indeed, 
follows  up  his  subject  all  through  without 
changing  his  catchwords,  some  of  which 
we  will  briefly  recall.  A  careful  reader,  then 
[of  the  Gospel  and  Epistle],  will  find  in  each 
frequent  mention  of  Light,  Life,  of  flight 
from  darkness;  constant  repetition  of  the 
words  Truth,  Grace,  Joy,  Flesh  and  Blood 
of  the  Lord,  of  Judgment  and  Remission  of 
Sins,  of  God's  love  to  usward,  of  the  com- 
mand that  we  love  one  another,  of  the 
injunction  to  keep  all  the  commandments, 
of  the  world's  condemnation  and  of  the 
Devil's,  of  the  Antichrist,  of  the  Promise  of 
the  Holy  Spirit,  of  God's  Adoption  of  us, 
of  Faith  perpetually  demanded  of  us.  The 
union  of  Father  and  Son  pervades  both 
works  (i.e.,  Gospel  and  Epistle  of  John), 
and,  if  we  scan  their  character  all  through, 
the  sense  is  forced  on  us  of  one  and  the  same 
complexion  in  Gospel  and  Epistle.  But  the 
Apocalypse  stands  in  absolute  contrast  to 
each.  It  nowhere  touches  or  approaches 
either  of  them,  and,  we  may  fairly  say,  has 
not  a  single  syllable  in  common  with  them; 
any  more  than  the  Epistle — not  to  men- 
tion the  Gospel — contains  reminiscence  or 
thought  of  the  Apocalypse,  or  Apocalypse 
of  Epistle;  although  Paul  in  his  epistles 
hinted  details  of  his  apocalypses  (i.e.,  revela- 
tions), without  writing  them  down  in  a  sub- 
stantive book.  Moreover,  we  can  base  a 
conclusion  on  the  contrast  of  style  there  is 


Ancient  Exegesis  7 

between  Gospel  and  Epistle  on  the  one  side, 
and  Apocalypse  on  the  other.  For  the 
former  not  only  use  the  Greek  language  with- 
out stumbling,  but  are  throughout  written 
with  great  elegance  of  diction,  of  reasoning 
and  arrangement  of  expressions.  We  are 
far  from  meeting  in  them  with  barbarous 
words  and  solecisms,  or  any  vulgarisms  what- 
ever; for  their  writer  had  both  gifts,  because 
the  Lord  endowed  him  with  each,  with  that 
of  knowledge  and  that  of  eloquence.  I  do 
not  deny  to  the  other  his  having  received 
the  gifts  of  knowledge  and  prophecy,  but  I 
cannot  discern  in  him  an  exact  knowledge 
of  Greek  language  and  tongue.  He  not  only 
uses  barbarous  idioms,  but  sometimes  falls 
into  actual  solecisms;  which,  however,  I 
need  not  now  detail,  for  my  remarks  are 
not  intended  to  make  fun  of  him — far  be 
it  from  me — but  only  to  give  a  correct  idea 
of  the  dissimilitude  of  these  writings. 

Modern  divines  attach  little  weight  to  this 
well-reasoned  judgment  of  Dionysius;  perhaps 
because  among  us  Greek  is  no  longer  a  living 
language.  They  forget  that  Dionysius  lived 
less  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  years  later  than 
the  authors  he  here  compares,  and  was  there- 
fore as  well  qualified  to  distinguish  between 
them  as  we  are  to  distinguish  between  Lodowick 
Muggleton  and  Bishop  Burnet.  We  should 
have  no  difficulty  in  doing  so,  and  yet  they  are 
further  from  us  by  a  hundred  years  than  these 
authors  were  from  Dionysius.  Whether  or  no 


8  New  Testament  Criticism 

the  fourth  gospel  was  a  work  of  the  Apostle 
John,  the  conclusion  stands  that  it  cannot  be 
from  the  hand  which  penned  Revelation.  This 
conclusion  Eusebius,  the  historian  of  the  Church, 
espoused,  and,  following  him,  the  entire  Eastern 
Church;  nor  was  the  authority  of  Revelation 
rehabilitated  in  the  Greek  world  before  the 
end  of  the  seventh  century,  while  the  outlying 
Churches  of  Syria  and  Armenia  hardly  admitted 
it  into  their  canons  before  the  thirteenth. 
In  Rome,  however,  and  generally  in  the  West, 
where  it  circulated  in  a  Latin  version  which 
disguised  its  peculiar  idiom,  it  was,  so  far  as  we 
know,  admitted  into  the  canon  from  the  first, 
and  its  apostolic  authorship  never  impugned. 

The  early  Fathers  seldom  display  such  critical 
ability  as  the  above  extract  reveals  in  the  case 
of  Dionysius.  Why,  it  may  be  asked,  could  so 
keen  a  discrimination  be  exercised  in  this 
particular  and  nowhere  else?  What  was  there 
to  awake  and  whet  the  judgment  here,  when 
in  respect  of  other  writings  it  continued  to 
slumber  and  sleep?  The  context  in  Eusebius's 
pages  reveals  to  us  the  cause.  The  more  learned 
and  sober  circles  of  believers  had,  in  the  last 
quarter  of  the  second  and  the  first  of  the  third 
centuries,  wearied  and  become  ashamed  of  the 
antics  of  the  Millennarists,  who  believed  that 
Jesus  Christ  was  to  come  again  at  once  and 
establish,  not  in  a  vague  and  remote  heaven, 


O!  l 

lef 
oy 

OU>M  XI  A 
KAIAI_M  ATOCKAl 


T  IMONON 
' 


KM  TCUAIM  AHKAi 
*!  OMNACcrriN  TO 
M.Af'l  YfOYNOTH- 
I  INAC-C'F  |  MI  I/Mi 
c>i  I  Ao  |  ion  KT"/ 


IOAIMA 


RAHOMCN/IMAf 

'  i  y  f  i  A'  I  oy  OY  M  <  /  /.- 

«  'I'TIMO  J  IAriHl"r 
^  *MAf  T 


fxC'Ni  i  c^*i  i  c  >yyy 

A)    K>y 

ric  ION 

C  XC  I   I  M  M  MAf  I 

A  r  K  M  t  Kj    |Xi  )C)Mu 


MM  ncr  IOIM 


I    JOHN  V.,  5-10 

9 


io  New  Testament  Criticism 

but  on  this  earth  itself,  a  reign  of  peace,  plenty, 
and  carnal  well-being. '  These  enthusiasts  ap- 
pealed to  the  Apocalypse  when  their  dreams 
were  challenged ;  and  the  obvious  way  to  silence 
them  was  to  prove  that  that  book  possessed  no 
apostolic  authority.  The  Millennarists  might 
have  retorted,  and  their  retort  would  have  been 
true,  that  if  one  of  the  books  was  to  go,  then 
the  gospel  must  go,  on  the  ground  that  the 
Apostle  John,  whom  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
reveals  as  a  Judaising  Christian,  could  not  pos- 
sibly have  written  it,  though  he  might  well  have 
penned  the  Apocalypse.  The  age  was  of  course 
too  ignorant  and  uncritical  for  such  an  answer 
to  suggest  itself;  but  the  entire  episode  serves  to 
illustrate  a  cardinal  principle  of  human  nature, 
which  is,  that  we  are  never  so  apt  to  discover  the 
truth  as  when  we  have  an  outside  reason  for 
doing  so,  and  in  religion  especially  are  seldom 
inclined  to  abandon  false  opinions  except  in 
response  to  material  considerations. 

Two  other  Christian  Fathers  have  a  place  in 
the  history  of  textual  criticism  of  the  New 
Testament — Origen  and  Jerome.  The  former 
of  these  was  not  a  critic  in  our  sense  of  the  word. 
He  notices  that  there  was  much  variety  of  text 
between  one  manuscript  and  another,  but  he 
seems  seldom  to  have  asked  himself  which  of  the 
two  variants  was  the  true  one.  For  example,  in 
Hebrews  ii.,  9,  he  notices  that  in  some  MSS. 


Ancient  Exegesis  1 1 

the  text  ran  thus:  that  by  the  grace  of  God  he 
(Jesus)  should  taste  death,  but  in  others  thus: 
that  without  God  he  should,  etc.  He  professes 
himself  quite  content  to  use  either.  In  a  few 
cases  he  corrects  a  place  name,  not  from  the 
evidence  of  the  copies,  but  because  of  the  cur- 
rent fashion  of  his  age.  Thus  in  Matthew  viii., 
28,  the  scene  of  the  swine  driven  by  demons  into 
the  lake  was  in.  some  MSS.  fixed  at  Gerasa,  in 
others  at  Gadara.  But  in  Origen's  day  pilgrims 
were  shown  the  place  of  this  miracle  at  Gergesa, 
and  accordingly  he  was  ready  to  correct  the 
text  on  their  evidence,  as  if  it  was  worth  any- 
thing. One  other  reason  he  adds  for  adopting 
the  reading  Gergesa,  very  characteristic  of  his 
age.  It  amounts  to  this,  that  the  name  Gergesa 
means  in  Hebrew  "the  sojourning-place  of  them 
that  cast  out";  and  that  divine  Providence  had 
allotted  this  name  to  the  town  because  the 
inhabitants  were  so  scared  by  the  miracle  of  the 
swine  that  they  exhorted  Jesus  to  quit  their 
confines  without  delay! 

One  other  example  may  be  advanced  of 
Origen's  want  of  critical  acumen.  In  Matthew, 
xxvii.,  17,  he  decided  against  the  famous  read- 
ing Jesus  Barabbas  as  the  name  of  the  brigand 
who  was  released  instead  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
on  the  ground  that  a  malefactor  had  no  right 
to  so  holy  a  name  as  Jesus. 

Origen's  defence  of  allegory  as  an  aid  to  the 


12  New  Testament  Criticism 

interpretation  no  less  of  the  New  than  of  the  Old 
Testament  forms  a  curious  chapter  in  the  history 
of  criticism. 

Marcion,  in  the  middle  of  the  second  century, 
had  pitilessly  assailed  the  God  of  the  Jews,  and 
denounced  the  cruelty,  lust,  fraud,  and  rapine 
of  the  Hebrew  patriarchs  and  kings,  the  fa- 
vourites of  that  God.  In  the  middle  of  the  third 
century  the  orthodox  were  still  hard  put  to  it  to 
meet  the  arguments  of  Marcion,  and,  as  Milton 
has  it,  "to  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men." 
Origen,  learned  teacher  as  he  was,  saw  no  way 
out  of  the  difficulty  other  than  to  apply  that 
method  of  allegory  which  Philo  had  applied  to 
the  Old  Testament;  and  in  his  work,  On  First 
Principles,  book  iv.,  we  have  an  exposition  of 
the  method.  He  premises,  firstly,  that  the  Old 
Testament  is  divinely  inspired,  because  its 
prophecies  foreshadow  Christ;  and,  secondly, 
that  there  is  not  either  in  Old  or  New  Testa- 
ment a  single  syllable  void  of  divine  meaning 
and  import.  But  how,  he  asks  (in  book  iv. 
chap.  17),  can  we  conciliate  with  this  tenet  of 
their  entire  inspiration  the  existence  in  the 
Bible  of  such  tales  as  that  of  Lot  and  his  daugh- 
ters, of  Abraham  prostituting  first  one  wife  and 
then  another,  of  a  succession  of  at  least  three 
days  and  nights  before  the  sun  was  created? 
Who,  he  asks,  will  be  found  idiot  enough  to  be- 
lieve that  God  planted  trees  in  Paradise  like  any 


Ancient  Exegesis  13 

husbandman ;  that  he  set  up  in  it  visible  and  pal- 
pable tree- trunks,  labelled  the  one  "Tree  of 
Life,"  and  the  other  "Tree  of  Knowledge  of 
Good  and  Evil,"  both  bearing  real  fruit  that 
might  be  masticated  with  corporeal  teeth;  that 
he  went  and  walked  about  the  garden;  that 
Adam  hid  under  a  tree;  that  Cain  fled  from  the 
face  of  God?  The  wise  reader,  he  remarks, 
may  well  ask  what  the  face  of  God  is,  and  how 
any  one  could  get  away  from  it?  Nor,  he  con- 
tinues, is  the  Old  Testament  only  full  of  such 
incidents,  as  no  one  regardful  of  good  sense  and 
reason  can  suppose  to  have  really  taken  place  or 
to  be  sober  history.  In  the  Gospels  equally, 
he  declares,  such  narratives  abound;  and  as 
an  example  he  instances  the  story  of  the  Devil 
plumping  Jesus  down  on  the  top  of  a  lofty 
mountain,  from  which  he  showed  him  all  the 
kingdoms  of  the  earth  and  their  glory.  How,  he 
asks,  can  it  be  literally  true,  how  a  historical 
fact,  that  from  a  single  mountain-top  with 
fleshly  eyes  all  the  realms  of  Persia,  of  Scythia, 
and  of  India  could  be  seen  adjacent  and  at  once? 
The  careful  reader  will,  he  says,  find  in  the 
Gospels  any  number  of  cases  similar  to  the 
above.  In  a  subsequent  paragraph  he  instances 
more  passages  which  it  is  absurd  to  take  in  their 
literal  sense.  Such  is  the  text  Luke  x.,  4,  in 
which  Jesus  when  he  sent  forth  the  Twelve 
Apostles  bade  them  "Salute  no  man  on  the 


14  New  Testament  Criticism 

way."  None  but  silly  people,  he  adds,  believe 
that  our  Saviour  delivered  such  a  precept  to  the 
Apostles.  And  how,  he  goes  on,  particularly 
in  a  land  where  winter  bristles  with  icicles  and 
is  bitter  with  frosts,  could  any  one  be  asked  to  do 
with  only  two  tunics  and  no  shoes?  And  then 
that  other  command  that  a  man  who  is  smitten 
on  the  right  cheek  shall  also  turn  the  left  to  the 
smiter — how  can  it  be  true,  seeing  that  any 
one  who  smites  another  with  his  right  hand  must 
necessarily  smite  his  left  cheek  and  not  his  right? 
And  another  of  the  things  to  be  classed  among 
the  impossible  is  the  prescription  found  in  the 
Gospel,  that  if  thy  right  eye  offend  thee  it  shall 
be  plucked  out.  For  even  if  we  take  this  to 
apply  to  our  bodily  eyes,  how  is  it  to  be  con- 
sidered consistent,  whereas  we  use  both  eyes  to 
see,  to  saddle  one  eye  only  with  the  guilt  of  the 
stumbling-block,  and  why  the  right  eye  rather, 
than  the  left? 

Wherever,  he  argues  (chap.  15),  we  meet  with 
such  useless,  nay  impossible,  incidents  and 
precepts  as  these,  we  must  discard  a  literal 
interpretation  and  consider  of  what  moral  inter- 
pretation they  are  capable,  with  what  higher 
and  mysterious  meaning  they  are  fraught,  what 
deeper  truths  they  were  intended  symbolically 
and  in  allegory  to  shadow  forth.  The  divine 
wisdom  has  of  set  purpose  contrived  these  little 
traps  and  stumbling-blocks  in  order  to  cry  halt 


Ancient  Exegesis  15 

to  our  slavish  historical  understanding  of  the 
text,  by  inserting  in  its  midst  sundry  things 
that  are  impossible  and  unsuitable.  The  Holy 
Spirit  so  waylays  us  in  order  that  we  may  be 
driven  by  passages  which  taken  in  their  prima- 
facie  sense  cannot  be  true  or  useful,  to  search 
for  the  ulterior  truth,  and  seek  in  the  Scriptures 
which  we  believe  to  be  inspired  by  God  a  mean- 
ing worthy  of  Him. 

In  the  sequel  it  occurs  to  Origen  that  some  of 
his  readers  may  be  willing  to  tolerate  the  appli- 
cation of  this  method  to  the  Old  Testament,  and 
yet  shrink  from  applying  it  wholesale  to  the 
New.  He  reassures  them  by  insisting  on  what 
Marcion  had  denied — namely,  on  the  fact  that 
the  same  Spirit  and  the  same  God  inspired  both 
Old  and  New  alike,  and  in  the  same  manner. 
Whatever,  therefore,  is  legitimate  in  regard  to 
the  one  is  legitimate  in  regard  to  the  other  also. 
"Wherefore  also  in  the  Gospels  and  Epistles 
the  Spirit  has  introduced  not  a  few  incidents 
which,  by  breaking  in  upon  and  checking  the 
historical  character  of  the  narrative,  with 
which  it  is  impossible  to  reconcile  them,  turn 
back  and  recall  the  attention  of  the  reader  to  an 
examination  of  their  inner  meaning/' 

Origen  admits  (chap.  19)  that  the  passages 
in  Scripture  which  bear  a  spiritual  sense  and  no 
other  are  considerably  outnumbered  by  those 
which  stand  good  as  history.  Let  no  one,  he 


1 6  New  Testament  Criticism 

pleads,  suspect  us  of  asserting  that  we  think 
none  of  the  Scriptural  narratives  to  be  histori- 
cally true,  because  we  suspect  that  some  of 
the  events  related  never  really  happened.  On 
the  contrary,  we  are  assured  that  in  the  case 
of  as  many  as  possible  their  historical  truth  can 
be  and  must  be  upheld.  Moreover,  of  the  pre- 
cepts delivered  in  the  Gospel  it  cannot  be 
doubted  that  very  many  are  to  be  literally 
observed,  as  when  it  says:  But  I  say  unto  you, 
Swear  not  at  all.  At  the  same  time,  any  one  who 
reads  carefully  will  be  sure  to  feel  a  doubt 
whether  this  and  that  narrative  is  to  be  regarded 
as  literally  true  or  only  half  true,  and  whether 
this  and  that  precept  is  to  be  literally  observed 
or  not.  Wherefore  with  the  utmost  study  and 
pains  we  must  strive  to  enable  every  single 
reader  with  all  reverence  to  understand  that  in 
dealing  with  the  contents  of  the  sacred  books 
he  handles  words  which  are  divine  and  not 
human. 

It  is  curious  in  the  above  to  note  that  the  one 
precept  on  the  literal  observance  of  which 
Origen  insists — namely,  the  prohibition  of  oaths 
— is  just  that  which  for  centuries  all  Christian 
sects,  with  the  exception  of  the  medieval  Cathars 
and  modern  Quakers,  have  flouted  and  defied. 
This  by  the  way.  It  is  more  important  to 
note  how  these  chapters  of  Origen  impress  a 
would-be  liberal  Anglican  divine  of  to-day. 


Ancient  Exegesis  17 

"In  reading  most  of  Origen's  difficulties, "  writes 
Dean  Farrar  in  his  History  of  Interpretation,  p. 
193,  "we  stand  amazed.  ...  By  the  slightest 
application  of  literary  criticism  they  vanish  at  a 
touch/*  And  just  above,  p.  190:  "The  errors 
of  the  exegesis  which  Origen  tended  to  establish 
for  more  than  a  thousand  years  had  their  root 
in  the  assumption  that  the  Bible  is  throughout 
homogeneous  and  in  every  particular  super- 
naturally  perfect. "  And  again,  p.  196:  "Hav- 
ing started  with  the  assumption  that  every 
clause  of  the  Bible  was  infallible,  supernatural, 
and  divinely  dictated,  and  having  proved  to 
his  own  satisfaction  that  it  could  not  be  intended 
in  its  literal  sense,  he  proceeded  to  systematise 
his  own  false  conclusions. " 

No  doubt  such  criticisms  are  just,  but  did  the 
antecedents  of  Dean  Farrar  entitle  him  to  pass 
them  upon  Origen,  who  was  at  least  as  respon- 
sive to  the  truth  as  in  his  age  any  man  could  be 
expected  to  be?  In  reading  these  pages  of  the 
modern  ecclesiastic  we  are  reminded  of  the 
picture  in  the  Epistle  of  James  i.,  23,  of  him 
"who  is  a  hearer  of  the  word  and  not  a  doer:  he 
is  like  unto  a  man  beholding  his  horoscope  in  a 
divining  crystal  (or  mirror);  for  he  beholdeth 
himself,  and  goeth  away,  and  straightway 
forgetteth  what  manner  of  man  he  was.'* 

Jerome,  who  was  born  about  346,  and  died 
420,  deserves  our  respect  because  he  saw  the 


i8  New  Testament  Criticism 

necessity  of  basing  the  Latin  Bible  not  upon 
the  Septuagint  or  Greek  translation,  but  upon  the 
Hebrew  original.  It  illustrates  the  manners  of 
the  age  that  when  he  was  learning  Hebrew,  in 
which  for  his  time  he  made  himself  extraordi- 
narily proficient,  the  Jewish  rabbis  who  were  his 
teachers  had  to  visit  him  by  night,  for  fear  of 
scandal.  In  this  connection  Jerome  compares 
himself  to  Christ  visited  by  Nicodemus.  It 
certainly  needed  courage  in  that,  as  in  sub- 
sequent ages,  to  undertake  to  revise  a  sacred  text 
in  common  use,  and  Jerome  reaped  from  his  task 
much  immediate  unpopularity.  His  revision, 
of  course,  embraced  the  New  as  well  as  the  Old 
Testament,  but  his  work  on  the  New  contained 
nothing  very  new  or  noteworthy. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  HARMONISTS 

THE  sixth  article  of  the  Church  of  England 
lays  it  down  that  "Holy  Scripture  con- 
taineth  all  things  necessary  to  salvation,"  which 
is  not  the  same  thing  as  to  say  that  everything 
contained  in  Holy  Scripture  is  necessary  to 
salvation.  Nevertheless,  this  in  effect  has  been 
the  dominant  view  of  the  reformed  churches. 
Underneath  the  allegorical  method  of  inter- 
preting the  Bible,  which  I  have  exemplified  from 
the  works  of  Origen,  lay  the  belief  that  every 
smallest  portion  of  the  text  is  inspired;  for, 
apart  from  this  belief,  there  was  no  reason  not  to 
set  aside  and  neglect  passages  that  in  their  literal 
and  primary  sense  seemed  unhistorical  and 
absurd,  limiting  the  inspiration  to  so  much  of 
the  text  as  could  reasonably  be  taken  for  true. 
The  Reformation  itself  predisposed  those 
churches  which  came  under  its  influence  to 
accept  the  idea  of  verbal- inspiration ;  for,  having 
quarrelled  with  the  Pope,  and  repudiated  his 
authority  as  an  interpreter  of  the  text  and  arbiter 
of  difficulties  arising  out  of  it,  they  had  no 
19 


2O  New  Testament  Criticism 

oracle  left  to  appeal  to  except  the  Bible,  and  they 
fondly  imagined  that* they  could  use  it  as  a 
judge  uses  a  written  code  of  law.  As  such  a 
code  must  be  consistent  with  itself,  and  free 
from  internal  contradictions,  in  order  to  be  an 
effective  instrument  of  government  and  admin- 
istration, so  must  the  Bible;  and  before  long  it 
was  felt  on  all  sides  to  be  flat  blasphemy  to 
impute  to  a  text  which  was  now  called  outright 
"the  Word  of  God"  any  inconsistencies  or 
imperfections.  The  Bible  was  held  by  Protest- 
ants to  be  a  homogeneous  whole  dictated  to  its 
several  writers,  who  were  no  more  than  passive 
organs  of  the  Holy  Spirit  and  amanuenses  of 
God.  "Scripture,"  wrote  Quenstedt  (1617- 
1688),  a  pastor  of  Wittenberg,  "is  a  fountain 
of  infallible  truth,  and  exempt  from  all  error; 
every  word  of  it  is  absolutely  true,  whether 
expressive  of  dogma,  of  morality,  or  of  history." 
Such  a  view  left  to  Protestants  no  loophole  of 
allegory,  and  their  divines  have  for  generations 
striven  to  reconcile  every  one  statement  in  the 
Bible  with  every  other  by  harmonistic  shifts  and 
expedients  which,  in  interpreting  other  docu- 
ments, they  would  disdain  to  use.  Of  these 
forced  methods  of  explanation  it  is  worth  while 
to  examine  a  few  examples,  for  there  is  no  better 
way  of  realising  how  great  an  advance  has  been 
made  towards  enlightenment  in  the  present  age. 
Our  first  example  shall  be  taken  from  a  work 


The  Harmonists  21 

entitled  A  Harmony  of  the  Four  Evangelists, 
which  was  published  in  1702  by  William  Whis- 
ton  (1667-1752),  a  man  of  vast  and  varied 
attainments.  A  great  mathematician,  he  suc- 
ceeded Sir  Isaac  Newton  in  the  Lucasian  chair 
at  Cambridge,  but  was  deprived  of  it  in  1710 
for  assailing  in  print  the  orthodox  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity.  In  his  old  age  he  quitted  the 
ranks  of  the  English  clergy,  because  he  dis- 
liked the  so-called  Athanasian  Creed,  and  be- 
came an  Anabaptist.  He  was  deeply  read  in 
the  Christian  Fathers,  and  was  the  author  of 
many  theological  works.  It  marks  the  absolute 
sway  over  men's  minds  in  that  epoch  of  the 
dogma  of  the  infallibility  and  verbal  inspiration 
of  the  Bible  that  so  vigorous  and  original  a 
thinker  as  Whiston  could  imagine  that  he  had 
reconciled  by  such  feeble  devices  the  manifold 
contradictions  of  the  Gospels.  Take,  for  ex- 
ample, the  seventh  of  the  principles  or  rules  he 
formulated  to  guide  students  in  harmonising 
them.  It  runs  as  follows: 

P.  118,  vii. — The  resemblance  there  is 
between  several  discourses  and  miracles  of 
our  Saviour  in  the  several  Gospels,  which  the 
order  of  the  evangelical  history  places  at 
different  times,  is  no  sufficient  reason  for  the 
superseding  such  order,  and  supposing  them 
to  be  the  very  same  discourses  and  miracles. 

He  proceeds  to  give  examples  for  the  applica- 


22 


New  Testament  Criticism 


tion  of  the  above  rule, 
follows : 


The  first  of  them  is  as 


Thus  it  appears  that  our  Saviour  gave 
almost  the  very  same  instructions  to  the 
Twelve  Apostles,  and  to  the  Seventy  Dis- 
ciples, at  their  several  missions;  the  one 
recorded  by  St.  Matthew,  the  other  by  St. 
Luke,  as  the  likeness  of  the  occasions  did 
require.  Now  these  large  instructions,  being 
in  two  Gospels,  have  been  by  many  refer 'd  to 
the  same  time,  by  reason  of  their  similitude. 

That  the  reader  may  judge  for  himself  how 
absurdly  inadequate  this  explanation  is,  the  two 
resembling  discourses  are  here  set  out  in  op- 
posing columns: 


Luke  x.,  i:  Now 
after  these  things  the 
Lord  appointed  seven- 
ty others,  and  sent 
them  two  and  two  be- 
fore his  face  into  every 
city  and  place,  whither 
he  himself  was  about 
to  come.  And  he  said 
unto  them,  The  har- 
vest is  plenteous,  but 
the  labourers  are  few: 
pray  ye  therefore  the 
Lord  of  the  harvest, 
that  he  send  forth 
labourers  into  his  har- 
vest, Go  your  ways: 


Matthew  x.,  I :  And 
he  called  unto  him 
his .  twelve  disciples, 
and  gave  them  author- 
ity.  .  .  . 

5:  These  twelve 
Jesus  sent  forth,  and 
charged  them,  say- 
ing. .  .  . 

Matthew  ix.,  37: 
Then  saith  he  unto 
his  disciples,  The  har- 
vest, etc.  .  .  . 
(Identical  as  far  as 
"into  his  harvest."  ) 

Matthew  x.,  16:  Be- 


The  Harmonists 


behold,  I  send  you 
forth  as  lambs  in  the 
midst  of  wolves. 
Carry  no  purse,  no 
wallet,  no  shoes:  and 
salute  no  man  on  the 
way.  And  into  what- 
soever house  ye  shall 
enter,  first  say,  Peace 
be  to  this  house.  And 
if  a  son  of  peace  be 
there,  your  peace  shall 
rest  upon  him:  but  if 
not,  it  shall  turn  to  you 
again.  .  .  .  But  into 
whatsoever  city  ye 
shall  enter,  and  they 
receive  you  not,  go 
out  into  the  streets 
thereof  and  say,  Even 
the  dust  from  your 
city,  that  cleaveth  to 
our  feet,  we  do  wipe 
off  against  you:  how- 
beit  know  this,  that 
the  kingdom  of  God  is 
come  nigh.  I  say  unto 
you,  It  shall  be  more 
tolerable  in  that  day 
for  Sodom,  than  for 
that  city. 


hold,  I  send  you  forth 
as  sheep  in  the  midst 
of  wolves. 

9,  10:  Get  you  no 
gold,  nor  silver,  nor 
brass  in  your  purses; 
no  wallet  for  journey, 
neither  two  coats,  nor 
shoes  nor  staff:  for  the 
labourer  is  worthy  of 
his  food. 

1 1 :  And  into  what- 
soever city  or  village 
ye  shall  enter,  search 
out  who  in  it  is  worthy ; 
and  there  abide  till  ye 
go  forth.  12:  And 
as  ye  enter  the  house, 
salute  it.  13:  And  if 
the  house  be  worthy, 
let  your  peace  come 
upon  it:  but  if  it  be 
not  worthy,  let  your 
peace  return  to  you. 
14:  And  whosoever 
shall  not  receive  you, 
nor  hear  your  words,  as 
ye  go  forth  out  of  that 
house  or  that  city, 
shake  off  the  dust  of 
your  feet.  15:  Verily 
I  say  unto  you,  It 
shall  be  more  tolerable 
for  the  land  of  Sodom 
and  Gomorrah  in  the 
day  of  judgment  than 


24  New  Testament  Criticism 


for  that  city.  7:  And 
as  ye  go,  preach,  say- 
ing, The  kingdom  of 
heaven  is  at  hand. 


Dean  Alford,  in  his  edition  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment which  appeared  in  1863,  begins  his  com- 
mentary on  Luke  x.  as  follows: 

Verses  1-16.  Mission  of  the  Seventy.— 
It  is  well  that  Luke  has  given  us  also  the 
sending  of  the  Twelve,  or  we  should  have 
had  some  of  the  commentators  asserting 
that  this  was  the  same  mission.  The  dis- 
course addressed  to  the  Seventy  is  in  sub- 
stance the  same  as  that  to  the  Twelve,  as  the 
similarity  of  their  errand  would  lead  us  to 
suppose  it  would  be. 

But  we  know  only  what  was  the  errand  of  the 
seventy  from  the  instructions  issued  to  them, 
and,  apart  from  what  Jesus  here  tells  them  to  do, 
we  cannot  say  what  they  were  intended  to  do. 
Were  there  any  mention  of  them  in  the  rest  of 
the  New  Testament,  we  might  form  some  idea 
apart  from  this  passage  of  Luke  of  what  their 
mission  was,  but  neither  in  the  Acts  is  allusion 
to  them  nor  in  the  Paulines.  It  was  assumed 
long  afterwards,  in  the  fourth  century,  when  a 
fanciful  list  of  their  names  was  concocted,  that 
they  were  intended  to  be  missionaries  to  the 
Gentiles,  who  were,  in  the  current  folklore  of 
Egypt  and  Palestine,  divided  into  seventy  or 
seventy-two  races;  but  this  assumption  con- 


The  Harmonists  25 

flicts  with  the  statement  that  they  were  to  go  in 
front  of  Jesus  to  the  several  cities  and  places 
which  he  himself  meant  to  visit.  Alford,  there- 
fore, argues  in  a  circle,  and  we  can  only  infer 
that  their  mission  was  similar  to  that  of  the 
Twelve,  because  their  marching  orders  were  so 
similar,  and  not  that  their  orders  were  similar 
because  their  mission  was  so. 

In  point  of  fact,  we  must  take  this  passage  of 
Luke  in  connection  with  other  passages  in  which 
his  language  tallies  with  that  of  Matthew. 
Practically  every  critic,  even  the  most  orthodox, 
admits  to-day  that  Matthew  and  Luke,  in  com- 
posing their  Gospels,  used  two  chief  sources — 
one  the  Gospel  of  Mark,  very  nearly  in  the 
form  in  which  we  have  it ;  and  the  other  a  docu- 
ment which,  because  Mark  reveals  so  little 
knowledge  of  it,  is  called  the  non-Marcan  docu- 
ment, and  by  German  scholars  Q — short  for 
Quelle  or  source.  By  comparing  those  portions 
of  Matthew  and  Luke  which,  like  the  two  just 
cited,  reveal,  not  mere  similarity,  but  in  verse 
after  verse  are  identical  in  phrase  and  wording, 
we  are  able  to  reconstruct  this  lost  document, 
which  consisted  almost  wholly  of  teachings  and 
sayings  of  Jesus,  with  very  few  narratives  of 
incidents.  The  Lucan  text  before  us  is  char- 
acterised by  exactly  the  same  degree  of  approxi- 
mation to  Matthew's  text  which  we  find  in  other 
passages;  for  example,  in  those  descriptive  of  the 


26  New  Testament  Criticism 

temptation  of  Jesus — namely,  Luke  iv.,  1-13  = 
Matthew  iv.,  i-n.  There  also,  however, 
Alford,  incurably  purblind,  asserts  (note  on 
Luke  iv.,  i)  that  "The  accounts  of  Matthew 
and  Luke  (Mark's  is  principally  a  compendium) 
are  distinct."  He  refers  us  in  proof  of  this 
assertion  to  his  notes  on  Matthew  and  Mark, 
although  in  those  notes  he  has  made  no  attempt 
to  substantiate  it. 

In  the  present  day,  then,  it  is  flogging  a  dead 
horse  to  controvert  Dean  Alford  or  William 
Whiston  on  such  a  point  as  this.  The  stand- 
point of  orthodox  criticism  in  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury is  well  given  in  a  useful  little  book  entitled 
The  Study  of  the  Gospels,  by  J.  Armitage  Robin- 
son, D.D.,  Dean  of  Westminster  (London,  1902). 
On  p.  in  of  this  book  there  is  a  table  of  certain 
passages  which  Luke  and  Matthew  derived  in 
common  from  the  non-Marcan  document,  and 
one  of  its  items  is  the  following : 

Luke  x.,  1-12.  Mission  of  seventy  dis- 
ciples =  Matt,  ix.,  37  ff.,  x.  iff. 

And,  again,  p.  112: 

Thus  in  ix.,  35~x.,  42  he  [Matthew]  has 
combined  the  charge  to  the  twelve  (Markvi., 
7  ff.)  with  the  charge  to  the  seventy,  which 
St.  Luke  gives  separately. 

But  there  is  a  problem  here  over  which  Dr. 
Robinson  passes  in  silence,  though  it  must 
surely  have  suggested  itself  to  his  unusually 


The  Harmonists  27 

keen  intelligence.  It  may  be  stated  thus: 
Why  does  Luke  make  two  missions  and  two 
charges,  one  of  the  Twelve  Apostles,  copied 
directly  from  Mark,  and  the  other  of  Seventy 
Disciples,  copied  directly  from  the  non-Marcan 
document;  whereas  Matthew  makes  only  one 
mission — that  of  the  Twelve — and  includes  in 
the  charge  or  body  of  instructions  given  to 
them  the  instructions  which  Luke  reserves  for 
the  Seventy  alone? 

The  question  arises:  Did  the  non-Marcan 
source  refer  these  instructions — which  Luke 
keeps  distinct — to  the  Twelve,  or  to  the  Seventy, 
or  to  no  particular  mission  at  all?  Here  are 
three  alternatives. 

In  favour  of  the  second  hypothesis  is  the  fact 
that  later  on  in  the  same  chapter — verses  17-20 
— Luke  narrates  the  return  of  the  Seventy  to 
Jesus  in  a  section  which  runs  thus: 

And  the  seventy  returned  with  joy,  say- 
ing, Lord,  even  the  devils  are  subject  unto 
us  in  thy  name.  And  he  said  unto  them,  I 
beheld  Satan  fallen  as  lightning  from  heaven. 
Behold,  I  have  given  you  authority  to  tread 
upon  serpents  and  scorpions,  and  over  all  the 
power  of  the  enemy ;  and  nothing  shall  in  any 
wise  hurt  you,  etc. 

Against  this  second  hypothesis  it  may  be 
contended  that — 

Firstly,   if  the  non-Marcan  source  had  ex- 


28  New  Testament  Criticism 

pressly  referred  these  instructions  to  the  corps  of 
Seventy  Disciples,  then  Matthew  could  not  have 
conflated  them  with  the  instructions  to  the 
Twelve  which  he  takes  from  Mark  vi.,  7-13. 

Secondly,  the  non-Marcan  document  which 
Luke  copied  in  his  tenth  chapter  was  itself  at 
the  bottom  identical  with  the  text  of  Mark  vi., 
7-13,  for  not  only  are  the  ideas  conveyed  in  the 
two  the  same,  but  the  language  so  similar  that  we 
must  infer  a  literary  connection  between  them. 

Thirdly,  in  Luke's  narrative  of  the  return  of 
the  Seventy  several  ideas  and  phrases  seem  to 
be  borrowed  from  a  source  used  by  the  author 
(probably  Aristion,  the  Elder)  of  the  last 
twelve  verses  of  Mark,  where  they  are  put  into 
the  mouth  of  the  risen  Christ. 

There  is  really  but  a  single  explanation  of  all 
these  facts,  and  it  is  this:  that  there  were  two 
closely  parallel  and  ultimately  identical  accounts 
of  a  sending  forth  of  apostles  by  Jesus,  one  of 
which  Mark  has  preserved,  while  the  other  stood 
in  the  non-Marcan  document.  This  latter  one 
contained  precepts  only,  and  did  not  specify  to 
whom  or  when  they  were  delivered.  Matthew 
saw  that  they  referred  to  one  and  the  same 
event,  and  therefore  blended  them  in  one  narra- 
tive. Luke,  on  the  other  hand,  obedient  to  his 
habit  of  keeping  separate  what  was  in  Mark 
from  what  was  in  the  non-Marcan  source,  even 
when  these  two  sources  repeated  each  other 


The  Harmonists  29 

verbally,  assumed  that  the  non-Marcan  narra- 
tive must  refer  to  some  other  mission  than  that 
of  the  Twelve,  the  account  of  •  which  he  had 
already  reproduced  verbally  from  Mark.  He 
conjectured  that  as  there  had  been  a  mission 
of  twelve  sent  only  to  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel, 
so  there  must  have  been  a  mission  of  seventy 
disciples  corresponding  to  the  seventy  elders 
who  had  translated  200  years  earlier  the  Hebrew 
Scriptures  into  Greek,  and  so  been  the  means 
of  diffusing  among  the  Gentiles  a  knowledge  of 
the  old  Covenant.  But  in  that  case  the  mission 
of  the  Seventy  is  pure  conjecture  of  Luke's. 
With  this  it  well  agrees  that  outside  this  chapter 
of  Luke  they  are  nowhere  else  mentioned  in  the 
New  Testament,  and  that  Eusebius,  the  his- 
torian of  the  Church,  searched  all  through  the 
many  Christian  writers  who  preceded  him  in 
the  first  and  second  centuries — writers  known 
to  him,  but  lost  for  us — in  order  to  find  a  list  of 
these  seventy  disciples,  but  found  it  not.  It  is 
incredible,  if  they  ever  existed,  that  in  all  this 
literature  there  should  have  been  no  independent 
mention  of  them. 

In  the  preceding  pages  I  have  somewhat 
anticipated  the  historical  development  of  critic- 
ism; but  it  was  right  to  do  so,  for  it  is  not 
easy  to  understand  its  earlier  stages  without 
contrasting  the  later  ones.  The  harmony  of 
William  Whiston  supplies  many  more  instances 


30  New  Testament  Criticism 

of  blind  adherence  to  the  dogma  that  in  the 
New  Testament,  as  being  the  Word  of  God, 
there  cannot  be,  because  there  must  not  be,  any 
contradictions  or  inconsistencies  of  statement. 
It  is  not  well,  however,  to  dwell  too  long  on  a 
single  writer,  and  I  will  next  select  an  example 
from  the  Dissertations  (Oxford,  1836)  of  that 
most  learned  of  men,  Edward  Greswell,  Fellow 
of  Corpus  Christi  College.  In  these  we  find 
harmonies  so  forced  that  even  Dean  Alford 
found  them  excessive.  Take  the  following  as 
an  example. 

In  Matthew  viii.,  19-22,  and  Luke  ix.,  57-60, 
the  same  pair  of  incidents  is  found  in  parallel  texts : 


Matt,  viii.,  19:  And 
there  came  a  Scribe, 
and  said  unto  him, 
Master,  I  will  follow 
thee  whithersoever 
thou  goest. 

20:  And  Jesus  saith 
unto  him,  The  foxes 
have  holes,  and  the 
birds  of  heaven  nests; 
but  the  Son  of  Man 
hath  not  where  to  lay 
his  head. 

2 1 :  And  another  of 
the  disciples  said  unto 
him,  Lord,  suffer  me 


Luke  ix.  57 :  And  as 
they  went  in  the  way, 
a  certain  man  said 
unto  him,  I  will  fol- 
low thee  whithersoever 
thou  goest. 

58:  And  Jesus  said, 
etc.  (as  in  Matt.). 


59:  And  he  said 
unto  another,  Follow 
me.  But  he  said, 


The  Harmonists  31 

first  to  go  and  bury  my     Lord,  suffer  me  first  to 
father.  go  and  bury  my  father. 

22:  But  Jesus  saith          60:  But  he  said  unto 
unto  him,  Follow  me;     him,  Leave  the  dead  to 
and  leave  the  dead  to     bury  their  own  dead; 
bury  their  own  dead.        but  go  thou  and  pub- 
lish abroad  the  king- 
dom of  God. 

Now,  in  Matthew  the  above  incidents  follow 
the  descent  of  Jesus  from  the  mount  on  which 
he  had  delivered  his  long  sermon,  separated 
therefrom  by  a  series  of  three  healings,  of  a 
leper,  of  a  centurion's  servant,  and  of  Peter's 
wife's  mother,  and  by  Jesus'  escape  from  the 
multitude  across  the  lake.  They  therefore 
occurred,  according  to  Matthew,  early  in  the 
ministry  of  Jesus,  and  in  Galilee,  to  the  very 
north  of  Palestine.  Luke,  on  the  contrary, 
sets  them  late  in  Jesus'  career,  when  he  was  on 
his  way  southward  to  Jerusalem,  just  before  the 
crucifixion.  Accordingly  Greswell  sets  Matt, 
viii.,  18-34  in  §  xx-  °f  the  third  part  of  his  har- 
mony on  November  I,  A.D.  28,  and  Luke  ix.. 
57-60  in  §  xxv.  of  the  fourth  part,  January  23, 

A.D.  30. 

This  acrobatic  feat  provokes  even  from  Dean 
Alford  the  following  note  on  Matt,  viii.,  19: 

Both  the  following  incidents  are  placed 
by  St.  Luke  long  after,  during  our  Lord's 
last  journey  to  Jerusalem.  For  it  is  quite 
impossible  (with  Greswell,  Diss.,iiL,  p.  155), 


32  New  Testament  Criticism 

in  any  common  fairness  of  interpretation, 
to  imagine  that  two  such  incidents  should 
have  twice  happened,  and  both  times  have 
been  related  together.  It  is  one  of  those 
cases  where  the  attempts  of  the  Harmonists 
do  violence  to  every  principle  of  sound  his- 
torical criticism.  Every  such  difficulty,  in- 
stead of  being  a  thing  to  be  wiped  out  and 
buried  at  all  hazards  (I  am  sorry  to  see,  e.g., 
that  Dr.  Wordsworth  takes  no  notice,  either 
here  or  in  St.  Luke,  of  the  recurrence  of  the 
two  narratives),  is  a  valuable  index  and 
guide  to  the  humble  searcher  after  truth, 
and  is  used  by  him  as  such. 

And  again  in  his  prolegomena,  §4,  Alford 
writes  of  the  same  two  passages  and  of  other 
similar  parallelisms  thus: 

Now  the  way  of  dealing  with  such  dis- 
crepancies has  been  twofold,  as  remarked 
above.  The  enemies  of  the  faith  have  of 
course  recognised  them,  and  pushed  them  to 
the  utmost ;  often  attempting  to  create  them 
where  they  do  not  exist,  and  where  they  do, 
using  them  to  overthrow  the  narrative  in 
which  they  occur.  While  this  has  been 
their  course,  equally  unworthy  of  the  Evan- 
gelists and  their  subject  has  been  that  of 
those  who  are  usually  thought  the  orthodox 
Harmonists.  They  have  usually  taken  upon 
them  to  state  that  such  variously  placed 
narratives  do  not  refer  to  the  same  incidents, 
and  so  to  save  (as  they  imagine)  the  credit  of 
the  Evangelists,  at  the  expense  of  common 
fairness  and  candour. 


The  Harmonists  33 

And  below  he  writes: 

We  need  not  be  afraid  to  recognise  real 
discrepancies,  in  the  spirit  of  fairness  and 
truth.  Christianity  never  was,  and  never 
can  be,  the  gainer  by  any  concealment,  warp- 
ing, or  avoidance  of  the  plain  truth,  wherever 
it  is  to  be  found. 

In  the  first  of  the  above  passages  cited  from 
Dean'Alford,  discrepancies  in  the  Gospels  are 
described  as  difficulties.  But  they  were  not 
such  apart  from  the  prejudice  that  the  Bible  was 
an  infallible,  uniform,  and  self-consistent  whole. 
Discard  this  idle  hypothesis,  which  no  one  ever 
resorted  to  in  reading  Thucydides  or  Herodotus, 
or  Julius  Caesar,  or  the  Vedas,  or  Homer,  or 
any  other  book  except  the  Bible,  and  these 
"difficulties"  vanish.  In  a  later  section  of  his 
prolegomena,  §  vi.,  22,  Alford  lays  down  a  pro- 
position more  pregnant  of  meaning  than  he 
realised : 

We  must  take  our  views  of  inspiration 
not,  as  is  too  often  done,  from  a  priori 
considerations,  but  ENTIRELY  FROM  THE 

EVIDENCE    FURNISHED     BY     THE     SCRIPTURES 
THEMSELVES. 

This  can  mean  only  that,  since  the  Gospels, 
no  less  than  other  books  of  the  Bible,  teem  with 
discrepancies,  therefore  their  plenary  inspiration 
(which  the  Dean  claimed  to  hold  to  the  utmost, 


34  New  Testament  Criticism 

while  rejecting  verbal  inspiration)  is  consistent 
with  such  discrepancies;  nor  merely  with  dis- 
crepancies, but  with  untruths  and  inaccuracies 
as  well.  For  where  there  are  two  rival  and  in- 
consistent accounts  of  the  same  fact  and  event 
one  must  be  true  and  the  other  false.  I  do  not 
see  how  Dean  Alford  could,  on  the  above 
premisses,  quarrel  with  one  who  should  main- 
tain that  the  Chronicle  of  Froissart  or  the  A  eta 
Sanctorum  was  quite  as  much  inspired  as  the 
Bible.  He  denounces  the  doctrine  of  verbal 
inspiration;  that  is  to  say,  the  teaching  "that 
every  word  and  phrase  of  the  Scriptures  is 
absolutely  and  separately  true,  and,  whether 
narrative  or  discourse,  took  place,  or  was  said, 
in  every  most  exact  particular  as  set  down." 
He  claims  to  exercise  "the  freedom  of  the 
Spirit "  rather  than  submit  to  "the  bondage  of 
the  letter/'  and  he  justly  remarks  that  the 
advocates  of  verbal  inspiration  "must  not  be 
allowed,  with  convenient  inconsistency,  to  take 
refuge  in  a  common-sense  view  of  the  matter 
wherever  their  theory  fails  them,  and  still  to 
uphold  it  in  the  main/' 

And  yet,  when  we  examine  his  commentary, 
we  find  him  almost  everywhere  timorous  and 
unscientific.  For  example,  the  most  orthodox  of 
modern  critics  frankly  admits  that  two  miracles 
in  Mark — that  of  the  feeding  of  the  four,  and 
that  of  the  five,  thousand — are  a  textual  doublet ; 


The  Harmonists  35 

I  mean  that  there  was  one  original  story  of  the 
kind,  which,  in  the  hands  of  separate  story- 
tellers or  scribes,  was  varied  in  certain  details, 
notably  as  to  the  place  and  period  at  which  the 
miracle  was  wrought,  and  as  to  the  number  of 
people  who  were  fed.  The  compiler  of  our 
second  Gospel  found  both  stories  current— no 
doubt  in  two  different  manuscripts — and,  in- 
stead of  blending  them  into  one  narrative,  kept 
them  separate,  under  the  impression  that  they 
related  different  incidents,  and  so  copied  them 
out  one  upon  and  after  the  other.  The  literary 
connection  between  these  two  stories  saute  aux 
yeux,  as  the  French  say — leaps  to  the  eyes.  Entire 
phrases  of  the  one  agree  with  entire  phrases  of  the 
other,  and  the  actions  detailed  in  the  one  agree 
with  and  follow  in  the  same  sequence  with  those 
detailed  in  the  other.  Long  before  Alford's 
time  open-eyed  critics  had  realised  that  the  two 
stories  were  variations  of  a  common  theme ;  and 
yet  Alford,  in  exemplification  of  his  canon 
(Chap.  I.,  §  iv.,  p.  5)  that  Similar  incidents 
must  not  be  too  hastily  assumed  to  be  the  same, 
writes  as  follows: 

If  one  Evangelist  had  given  us  the  feed- 
ing of  the  five  thousand,  and  another  that 
of  the  four,  we  should  have  been  strongly 
tempted  to  pronounce  the  incidents  the 
same,  and  to  find  a  discrepancy  in  the 
accounts;  but  our  conclusion  would  have 


36  New  Testament  Criticism 

been  false,  for  we  have  now  both  events 
narrated  by  each  of  two  Evangelists  (Mat- 
thew and  Mark),  and  formally  alluded  to  by 
our  Lord  Himself  in  connexion  (Matt,  xvi., 
9,  10;  Mark  viii.,  19,  20). 

He  also,  as  another  example  of  his  canon's 
applicability,  instances  the  stories  of  the  anoint- 
ings of  the  Lord  at  feasts,  first  by  a  woman  who 
was  a  sinner,  in  Luke  vii.,  36,  ff.t  and  again  by 
Mary  the  sister  of  Lazarus,  in  Matt,  xxvi.,  6, 
ff.t  and  Mark  xiv.,  3,  ff.,  and  John  xi.,  2,  and 
xii.,3,jf.  These  stories  are  so  like  one  another 
that,  as  Whiston  observes,  "the  great  Grotius 
(died  1645)  himself  was  imposed  upon,  and 
induc'd  to  believe  them  the  very  same.  Such 
fatal  mistakes,'*  he  adds,  "are  men  liable  to 
when  they  indulge  themselves  in  the  liberty  of 
changing  the  settled  order  of  the  Evangelists  on 
every  occasion." 

The  fatal  mistake,  of  course,  lay  with  Whiston, 
and  with  Alford,  who  took  up  the  same  position 
as  he.  Whiston  unconsciously  pays  a  great 
tribute  to  the  shrewdness  and  acumen  of 
Grotius. 

Latter-day  divines  are  somewhat  contemptu- 
ous of  the  attitude  of  their  predecessors  fifty 
years  ago.  Thus  Dr.  Sanday  writes  in  his 
Bampton  Lectures  of  1893  as  follows  (p.  392) : 

The    traditional    theory  needs   little    de- 


The  Harmonists  37 

scrip tion.  Fifty  years  ago  it  may  be  said  to 
have  been  the  common  belief  of  Christian 
men — at  least  in  this  country.  It  may  have 
been  held  somewhat  vaguely  and  indefinitely, 
and  those  who  held  it  might,  if  pressed  on  the 
subject,  have  made  concessions  which  would 
have  involved  them  in  perplexities.  But, 
speaking  broadly,  the  current  view  may  be 
said  to  have  been  that  the  Bible  as  a  whole 
and  in  all  its  parts  was  the  Word  of  God,  and 
as  such  that  it  was  endowed  with  all  the 
perfections  of  that  Word.  Not  only  did  it 
disclose  truths  about  the  Divine  nature 
and  operation  which  were  otherwise  un- 
attainable; but  all  parts  of  it  were  equally 
authoritative,  and  in  history,  as  well  as  in 
doctrine,  it  was*  exempt  from  error.  .  .  . 
This  was  the  view  commonly  held  fifty 
years  ago.  And  when  it  comes  to  be  ex- 
amined, it  is  found  to  be  substantially  not 
very  different  from  that  which  was  held  two 
centuries  after  the  birth  of  Christ. 

To  this  idea  of  verbal  inspiration  Dr.  Sanday 
opposes  what  he  calls  an  inductive  or  critical 
view  of  inspiration,  in  accordance  with  which 
the  believer  will,  where  the  two  conflict,  accept 
"the  more  scientific  statement.'*  On  this  view 
the  Bible  is  not  as  such  inspired,  and  the  in- 
spiration of  it  is  fitful,  more  active  in  one  portion 
of  it  than  in  another.  Where  the  two  views 
most  diverge  is  in  the  matter  of  the  historical 
books.  These  do  not  always  narrate  plain 
matter  of  fact,  as  they  were  supposed  to  do 


38  New  Testament  Criticism 

formerly;  nor  are  they  "  exempted  from  possibili- 
ties of  error/'  Where  they  conflict  with  scientific 
statements  they  must  be  regarded  "rather  as 
conveying  a  religious  lesson  than  as  histories. " 

I  do  not  grudge  this  writer  the  task  of  ex- 
tracting religious  lessons  out  of  certain  portions 
of  the  Old  Testament,  but  it  is  more  important 
to  consider  the  implications  of  this  modern 
Anglican  doctrine  of  inspiration.  Is  it  open  to 
every  one  and  any  one  to  pick  and  choose  and 
decide  what  in  the  Scriptures  is  true  and  what 
not,  what  inspired  and  what  uninspired?  Who 
is  to  be  trusted  with  this  new  task  of  detecting  an 
inner  canon  inside  of  the  old  canon  of  Scripture? 

There  is.  a  school  of  thinkers  inside  the  Church 
who  desire  to  assume  this  task,  and  who  never 
weary  of  insisting  on  the  authority  of  the  priest- 
hood in  this  matter.  That  somewhat  mordant, 
but  not  very  enlightened,  critic,  Sir  Robert 
Anderson,  in  a  work  entitled  The  Bible  and 
Modern  Criticism  (London,  1903),  not  unjustly 
observes  (p.  172)  that  "the  Lux  Mundi  school 
has  fallen  back  on  the  Church  as  the  source  of 
authority  .  .  .  because  the  Bible,  so  far  from 
being  infallible,  is  marred  by  error,  and  there- 
fore affords  no  sure  basis  of  faith.'*  And  this  is 
undoubtedly  the  point  of  view  of  High  Church 
clergymen.  It  remains  to  be  seen  whether  in 
the  minds  of  Englishmen  the  authority  of  the 
Church  will  survive  that  of  the  Bible. 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  DEISTS 

THE  Unitarian  movement,  which  flourished 
in  Poland  during  the  sixteenth  century, 
and  penetrated  to  England  in  the  seventeenth, 
contributed  but  little  to  the  criticism  of  the 
New  Testament.  It  is  true  that  Lelius  Socinus 
(1525-1562)  and  Faustus  Socinus  (1539-1604), 
his  nephew,  both  of  Siena,  after  whom  the  Uni- 
tarians were  called  Socinians,  denied  many 
tenets  held  to  be  fundamental  in  the  great 
churches  of  east  and  west,  such  as  that  of  the 
trinity  and  that  of  baptism  with  water;  but, 
no  more  than  the  medieval  Cathars  who  in 
both  these  respects  anticipated  them,  did  they 
dream  of  calling  in  aid  the  resources  of  textual 
criticism.  They  merely  accepted  the  New 
Testament  text  as  they  found  it  in  Erasmus's 
Greek  edition,  or  even  in  the  Latin  vulgate,  and 
accepted  it  as  fully  and  verbally  inspired.  No 
more  than  their  Calvinist  and  Jesuit  persecutors, 
had  they  any  idea  of  a  development  of  church 
doctrine  such  as  could  have  led  incidentally 
to  interpolations  and  alterations  of  the  texts. 
39 


40  New  Testament  Criticism 

They  questioned  neither  the  traditional  attri- 
butions of  these  texts  nor  their  historical  ve- 
racity. Nor  did  it  ever  occur  even  to  John  Locke 
to  doubt  the  plenary  inspiration  of  scripture, 
although  his  philosophy,  with  its  rejection  of 
authority  and  appeal  to  experience  and  common 
sense,  operated  strongly  for  the  creation  of  that 
rationalistic  school  of  thinkers  who  came  to  be 
known  as  Deists.  The  writers  of  this  school, 
who  flourished  at  the  end  of  the  seventeenth  and 
during  the  eighteenth  century,  dealt  with  many 
subjects;  but  they  all  of  them  stood  for  a  revolt 
against  authority  in  religion.  Thus  Tindal,  in 
his  preface  to  his  work,  Christianity  as  Old  as  the 
Creation;  or,  the  Gospel  a  Republication  of  the 
Religion  of  Nature,  declares  in  his  preface  that: 

He  builds  nothing  on  a  thing  so  uncer- 
tain as  tradition,  which  differs  in  most 
countries;  and  of  which,  in  all  countries,  the 
bulk  of  mankind  are  incapable  of  judging. 

The  scope  of  his  work  is  well  indicated  in  the 
headings  of  his  chapters,  one  and  all.  Take  for 
example  this: 

Chap.  I.:  That  God,  at  all  times,  has 
given  mankind  sufficient  means  of  knowing 
whatever  He  requires  of  them,  and  what 
those  means  are. 

And  in  this  chapter  we  read: 


The  Deists  41 

Too  great  a  stress  can't  be  laid  on  natural 
religion;  which,  as  I  take  it,  differs  not 
from  revealed,  but  in  the  manner  of  its  being 
communicated:  the  one  being  the  internal,  as 
the  other  the  external  revelation  of  the  same 
unchangeable  will  of  a  Being,  who  is  alike  at 
all  times  infinitely  wise  and  good. 

This  author  never  wearies  of  contrasting  the 
simplicity  of  natural  religion,  the  self -evidencing 
clearness  of  the  laws  of  goodness,  mercy,  and 
duty  impressed  on  all  human  hearts,  with  the 
complexity  and  uncertainty  of  a  revelation  which 
rests  or  is  contained  in  Scriptures;  and  he  knows 
how  to  enrol  leading  Anglican  authorities  on  his 
side  in  urging  his  point.  Thus  (p.  214  of  the 
third  edition,  London,  1732)  he  adduces  a 
passage  from  the  Polemical  Works  of  Jeremy 
Taylor,  which  begins  thus: 

Since  there  are  so  many  copies  with 
infinite  varieties  of  reading;  since  a  various 
interpunction,  a  parenthesis,  a  letter,  an 
accent,  may  much  alter  the  sense;  since  some 
places  have  divers  literal  senses,  many  have 
spiritual,  mystical,  and  allegorical  meanings; 
since  there  are  so  many  tropes,  metonymies, 
ironies,  hyperboles,  proprieties  and  impro- 
prieties of  language,  whose  understanding 
depends  on  such  circumstances,  that  it  is 
almost  impossible  to  know  the  proper  inter- 
pretation, now  that  the  knowledge  of  such 
circumstances,  and  particular  stories,  is 
irrecoverably  lost;  since  there  are  some 


42  New  Testament  Criticism 

mysteries  which,  at  the  best  advantage  of 
expression,  are  not  easy  to  be  apprehended; 
and  whose  explication,  by  reason  of  our 
imperfections,  must  needs  be  dark,  some- 
times unintelligible;  and,  lastly,  since  those 
ordinary  means  of  expounding  Scripture,  as 
searching  the  originals,  conference  of  places, 
parity  of  reason,  analogy  of  faith,  are  all 
dubious,  uncertain,  and  very  fallible;  he 
that  is  wisest,  and  by  consequence  the  like- 
liest to  expound  truest,  in  all  probability  of 
reason,  will  be  very  far  from  confidence. 

The  alternatives  are  thus  presented  of  be- 
coming " priests'  worshippers, "  with  "a  divine 
faith  in  their  dictates,"  or  of  resigning  oneself  to 
Bishop  Taylor's  attitude  of  suspense  and  doubt. 
For  as  that  writer  concludes:  "So  many  de- 
grees of  improbability  and  incertainty,  all  de- 
press our  certainty  of  finding  out  truth  in  such 
mysteries."  These,  as.  he  elsewhere  says 
(Polem.  Works,  p.  521):  "Have  made  it  im- 
possible for  a  man  in  so  great  a  variety  of  matter 
not  to  be  deceived."  The  first  alternative  in- 
volves, as  Chilling  worth  said  in  his  Religion  of 
Protestants,  a  "deifying"  by  some  Pope  or  other 
of  "his  own  interpretations  and  tyrannous  in 
forcing  them  upon  others";  and  a  Pope  is  "the 
common  incendiary  of  Christendom,"  who 
"tears  in  pieces,  not  the  coat,  but  the  bowels 
and  members  of  Christ:  ridente  Turca,  nee  dolente 
ludaeo" 


The  Deists  43 

From  the  above  extracts  we  can  judge  of 
Tindal's  position.  He  did  not  directly  attack 
orthodoxy;  indeed,  had  he  done  so  he  could 
hardly  have  retained  his  fellowship  at  All  Souls' 
College.  But  the  direct  implication  of  his  work 
throughout  was  this,  that  Christianity  is  not 
only  superfluous,  but  too  obscure  to  be  set  on  a 
level  with  natural  religion.  His  book  is  still 
worth  reading,  and  very  superior  to  the  feeble 
counterblasts  penned  by  several  contemporary 
divines,  one  of  whom  was  my  own  direct 
ancestor,  John  Conybeare,  Bishop  of  Bristol. 
Space  forbids  me  to  dwell  as  long  as  I  would  like 
to  on  the  work.  I  will  only  draw  attention  to 
his  acute  discussion  in  his  sixth  chapter  of 
the  intellectual  preconditions  of  any  revelation 
whatever.  Men,  he  there  argues,  must  have 
been  gifted  not  only  with  an  idea  of  a  perfect 
and  Supreme  Being,  but  with  a  certainty  of  his 
existence,  and  an  idea  of  his  perfections,  before 
they  can  even  approach  the  question,  Whether 
he  has  made  any  external  Revelation.  All  dis- 
cussion of  such  a  question  is  bound  to  be  idle 
"  except  we  could  know  whether  this  Being 
is  bound  by  his  external  word;  and  had  not, 
either  at  the  time  of  giving  it,  a  secret  will  incon- 
sistent with  his  revealed  will;  or  has  not  since 
changed  his  will."  The  modern  High  Church- 
man imagines  that  he  has  strengthened  the 
position  of  orthodoxy  by  a  doctrine  of  pro- 


44  New  Testament  Criticism 

gressive  revelation.  In  other  words,  Jehovah, 
when  he  delivered  the  Law  to  Moses,  com- 
municated neither  his  true  will  nor  the  whole 
truth  to  mankind;  he  only  did  so  when  he  sent 
Jesus  into  Judaea  and  founded  the  Christian 
Church  and  its  sacraments.  We  may  well  ask 
with  Tindal  how  we  can  be  sure  that  the  Church 
and  its  sacraments  exhaust  the  truth.  May 
there  not  still  remain  a  Secret  Will  in  reserve 
waiting  to  be  revealed,  as  little  consistent  with 
current  orthodoxy  and  its  dogmas  and  rites  as 
these  are  with  the  old  Jewish  religion  of  animal 
sacrifices?  Of  Tindal' s  work  only  the  first 
volume  was  published  in  1730,  when  he  was 
already  an  old  man.  He  died  in  1733,  leaving  a 
second  ready  for  the  press.  It  never  saw  the 
light,  for  Dr.  Gibson,  Bishop  of  London,  with 
whom  Tindal  had  more  than  once  crossed 
swords,  got  hold  of  the  manuscript  after  the 
author's  death,  and,  rightly  judging  that  it  was 
easier  to  suppress  than  answer  such  a  work,  had 
it  destroyed.  The  late  Bishop  Stubbs,  with 
unconscious  humour,  confesses  in  one  of  his 
letters  to  a  similar  action.  He  met  John 
Richard  Green  for  the  first  time  in  a  railway 
train,  and,  noticing  that  he  was  reading  Kenan's 
Life  of  Jesus,  engaged  him  in  a  discussion  of 
other  topics.  Before  the  conversation  ended 
the  Bishop  had  transferred  the  obnoxious  volume 
to  his  own  hand-bag  whence,  when  he  reached 


The  Deists  45 

his  home,  he  transferred  it  into  his  waste-paper 
basket.  So  history  repeats  itself  at  long  inter- 
vals. Amid  the  revolutions  of  theology  little 
remains  the  same  except  the  episcopal  temper. 

I  have  dwelt  first  on  Matthew  Tindal  be- 
cause his  work  illustrates  so  well  the  general 
tone  of  Deists.  I  must  now  turn  to  two  of  his 
contemporaries  who  are  memorable  for  their 
criticisms  of  the  New  Testament. 

The  author  of  the  first  Gospel  incessantly 
appends  to  his  narratives  of  Jesus  the  tag:  Now 
all  this  is  come  to  pass  that  it  might  be  fulfilled 
which  was  spoken  by  the  prophet.  So  in  Luke 
xxiv.,  25,  it  is  related  how  the  risen  Jesus,  on  the 
road  to  Emmaus,  by  way  of  convincing  two  of 
his  disciples  of  the  reality  of  his  resurrection, 
said  unto  them,  O  foolish  men  and  slow  of  heart 
to  believe  in  accordance  with  all  the  prophets 
have  spoken!  .  .  .  And  beginning  from  Moses 
and  from  all  the  prophets,  he  interpreted  to  them 
throughout  the  Scriptures  the  things  concerning 
himself. 

And  similarly  in  the  fourth  Gospel  (xix.,  28), 
Jesus,  that  the  Scripture  might  be  accomplished, 
said:  I  thirst,  .  .  .And  when  he  had  received 
the  vinegar,  he  said,  This  Scripture  also  is  ful- 
filled; and  he  bowed  his  head,  and  gave  up  his 
spirit.* 

1  Here  the  English  version,  following  all  the  MSS., 
renders:  "He  said,  It  is  finished"  (or  fulfilled).  But  the 


46  New  Testament  Criticism 

I  cite  these  passages  to  illustrate  the  character 
of  that  form  of  embellishment  of  the  narratives 
of  Jesus  to  which  the  name  of  prophetic  gnosis 
has  been  given,  and  which  was  the  chief— 
perhaps  the  only — weapon  of  his  followers 
against  the  Jews  who  scornfully  denied  him  to 
be  the  Messiah.  After  doing  service  against  the 
Jews,  the  same  argument  was  used  to  compel 
the  Gentiles  also  to  accept  the  new  religion ;  and 
Christian  literature,  until  the  other  day,  largely 
consisted  of  the  argument  from  prophecy,  as  it 
was  termed.  With  rabbinical  ingenuity,  thou- 
sands of  passages  were  torn  from  the  living  con- 
text which  gave  them  sense  and  meaning,  and 
distorted,  twisted,  mutilated,  misinterpreted,  in 
order  to  fit  them  in  as  predictions  of  Jesus  the 
Messiah.  No  one  thought  much  of  what  they 
signified  in  their  surroundings,  or,  indeed,  of 
whether  they  had  there  any  rational  significa- 
tion at  all. 

Now  early  in  the  seventeenth  century  a  few 
of  the  more  intelligent  students  of  the  Bible 
began  to  express  doubts  about  the  matter. 
Various  passages  taken  immemorially  for  pro- 
phecies of  Christ  seemed  on  closer  inspection  to 

words  survive  as  I  have  given  them  in  Eusebius's  citations 
of  the  passage  and  in  the  old  Georgian  version,  which  pro- 
bably reflects  the  second-century  Syriac  version.  Their 
extreme  frigidity  would  explain  their  omission  from  all  the 
Greek  MSS. 


The  Deists  47 

yield  a  better  and  more  coherent  sense  if  inter- 
preted by  reference  to  the  particular  portions  of 
the  Old  Testament  to  which  they  belonged. 
Such  of  them  as  were  really  anticipations  of  a 
future  were  seen  to  have  received  their  fulfil- 
ment in  the  close  sequel  of  the  Old  Testament 
history;  others  were  not  anticipations  at  all,  but 
statements  of  past  events  made  by  ancient 
writers.  It  was  pointed  out  by  scholars,  who 
now  began  to  familiarise  themselves  with  that 
tongue,  that  in  Hebrew  the  grammatical  forms 
expressive  of  past  and  future  action  are  almost 
identical,  and  easily  mistaken  for  one  another. 
Worse  still,  many  passages  of  the  Septuagint  or 
old  Greek  translation  of  the  Old  Testament  were 
found  on  examination  of  the  Hebrew  text  to  be 
mistranslations.  The  Hebrew  original,  rightly 
interpreted,  had  quite  another  meaning  than 
that  which  the  evangelists,  in  their  ignorance  of 
Hebrew,  had  blindly  accepted. 

William  Whiston,  whose  harmonistic  canons 
we  have  already  discussed  (p.  21  ff.),  was  im- 
pressed by  these  doubts,  and  set  himself  to  re- 
solve them.  He  could  not,  in  a  modern  and 
critical  manner,  admit  that  the  passages  of  the 
Old  Testament  adduced  by  the  first  and  other 
evangelists  as  prophecies  were  not  such,  but 
adopted  the  topsy-turvy  hypothesis  that  where 
the  old  Hebrew  text  did  not  warrant  the  Christ- 
ian abuse  of  it,  it  had  been  changed  and  cor- 


K  JK0  H  M  €  M  O  *  I  €  N  TO  I  < 
*v€  1!  O  1C  1  1  I?  |  I 
N-ON  CTO.HH  W  AC  y  KHN 
K  **  *  «i  SI  €  e  JkM  t  V 

6  *,£  A.  e  r  €  i 

e  K  o  KIU  §  €?  r  c  a  cl  N  *z«  M  T  *  ^ 
ire  To  M  *i^*2  A  f  H  M  ani^ 
ecnr  .Ky  ra  >  M  e'r  I  o  r;*  *i^f 

0  H  oy  K'S  c  rr  j.r  J5y  A^  ^  ^i 

o*ro  n  o  c  6  1  j  «  J4  Y  can  i&t  " 

A^nro^^A-A'   f  n  Kr^'tf 

1  ei  n  AT^  nr  o  i  c  M 


r6i  y 

Isl  r  *  Al  A^Cl  A,f4 

oe  K  -j 

-  K  Aifi^SA^^ 
c  A  i  cf  <>*>;  r  o  KI  A!  n  onroy 
M  ^*«n          * 
"f  " 


i  oy  Ae  N 
^  i  n  o  M  4  <i>o  a  oy  H 

A  jf  *  ^  V-  ' 


MARK  XVI.,  5-8 

48 


The  Deists  49 

rupted  by  Jewish  enemies  of  Christ.  In  the 
age  of  the  Apostles,  he  argued,  or  rather  as- 
sumed, the  Hebrew  text  had  agreed  with  the 
Greek,  so  that  they  could  argue  from  the  latter 
taken  in  its  literal  sense.  He  admitted  that  the 
texts  in  their  modern  form  are  irreconcilable; 
and,  having  learned  Hebrew,  he  boldly  set 
himself  to  re- write  the  original,  so  as  to  make  it 
tally  with  Christian  requirements.  But  here  a 
scholar  as  learned  as  himself,  but  less  encum- 
bered with  the  pedantry  of  orthodoxy,  crossed 
his  path.  This  was  Anthony  Collins  (1676- 
1729),  a  scholar  of  Eton  and  of  King's  College, 
Cambridge.  Already,  in  1707,  he  had  published 
a  work  in  which  he  pleaded  for  "the  use  of 
Reason  in  propositions  the  evidence  whereof 
depends  on  human  testimony."  In  1713  he 
issued  A  Discourse  on  Freethinking,  in  which 
he  showed  that  in  every  age  men  have  been 
virtuous  in  proportion  as  they  were  enlightened 
and  free  to  think  for  themselves.  Without  such 
freedom  of  thought  Christianity,  he  said,  could 
never  have  won  its  early  victories.  In  these 
two  works  he  hardly  went  beyond  what  his 
master  and  intimate  friend  John  Locke  might 
have  written ;  and  the  latter,  in  a  letter  addressed 
to  him  ten  years  earlier,  had  written  thus: 

Believe  it,  my  good  friend,  to  love  truth 
for    truth's    sake    is    the    principal    part    of 

4 


So  New  Testament  Criticism 

human  perfection  in  this  world,  and  the 
source  of  all  other  virtues:  and  if  I  mistake 
not,  you  have  as  much  of  it  as  ever  I  met 
with  in  anybody. 

The  above-mentioned  works,  and  also  an 
earlier  work  in  1709  entitled  Priestcraft  in  Per- 
fection, raised  up  against  Collins  a  plentiful 
crop  of  enemies;  he  had  already  been  obliged, 
in  1711,  to  retire  for  a  time  to  Holland  to  escape 
the  storm.  There  he  gained  the  friendship  of 
Le  Clerc  (1657-1736),  who  as  early  as  1685  had 
openly  attacked  the  belief  in  the  inspiration  of 
the  Bible,  as  it  was  then  and  long  afterwards 
formulated.  But  it  was  in  1724  that  Collins 
published  the  work  which  most  deeply  offended. 
This  was  his  Discourse  on  the  Grounds  and 
Reasons  of  the  Christian  Religion,  and  was  called 
forth  by  the  work  of  Whiston.  The  following 
passage  sums  up  the  results  at  which  he  arrives : 

In  fine,  the  prophecies  cited  from  the 
Old  Testament  by  the  authors  of  the  New 
do  so  plainly  relate,  in  their  obvious  and 
primary  sense,  to  other  matters  than  those 
which  they  are  produced  to  prove,  that  to 
pretend  they  prove,  in  that  sense,  what  they 
are  produced  to  prove  is  (as  Simon,  Bibl. 
Crit.,  vol.  iv.,  p.  513,  and  Histoire  Crit.  du 
Nouv.  Test.,  chaps.  21  and  22,  declares)  to 
give  up  the  cause  of  Christianity  to  Jews  and 
other  enemies  thereof;  who  can  so  easily 
show,  in  so  many  undoubted  instances,  the 


The  Deists  51 

Old  Testament  and  New  Testament  to  have 
no  manner  of  connection  in  that  respect, 
but  to  be  in  an  irreconcilable  state  (as  Whiston 
said  in  his  Essay,  etc.,  p.  282). 

The  remedy  proposed  by  Collins  is  that  of 
allegorising  the  so-called  prophecies,  and  of 
taking  them  in  a  secondary  sense  different 
from  their  obvious  and  literal  one.  In  no  other 
way,  he  urged,  can  they  be  adapted  to  the 
belief  in  the  spiritual  Messiah  who  is  yet  to 
appear;  for  the  prophecies  must  have  been 
fulfilled,  or  the  Christian  faith  which  they 
evidenced  is  false.  Since  they  were  demon- 
strably  never  fulfilled  in  their  literal  sense,  Col- 
lins argues  that  the  pointing  of  the  Hebrew  text 
must  be  altered,  the  order  of  words  and  letters 
transposed,  words  cut  in  half,  taken  away  or 
added — any  procrustean  methods,  in  short, 
employed,  in  order  to  force  the  text  into  some 
sort  of  conformity  with  the  events. 

The  good  faith  of  Collins  in  propounding 
such  a  remedy  was  questioned  by  the  many 
divines  who  undertook  to  answer  him,  and  also 
by  modern  historians  of  the  Deistic  movement, 
like  Leslie  Stephen.  He  was  accused  of  covertly 
ridiculing  and  destroying  the  Christian  religion, 
while  professing  to  justify  and  uphold  it.  This 
is  a  point  to  which  I  shall  presently  advert. 
For  the  moment  let  us  select  an  example  which 
illustrates  the  great  sagacity  and  acumen  he 


52  New  Testament  Criticism 

displayed  in  his  attack  on  the  argument  from 
prophecy.  It  shall  be  his  discussion  of  the  text 
Isaiah  vii.,  14,  invoked  in  Matt,  i.,  23:  Behold, 
jit  "i  the  virgin  shall  be  with  child,  and  shall  bring  forth 
a  son,  etc. 


These  words  [wrote  Collins],  as  they  stand 
in  Isaiah,  from  whom  they  are  supposed 
to  be  taken,  do,  in  their  obvious  and  literal 
sense,  relate  to  a  young  woman  in  the  days  of 
Ahaz,  King  of  Judah. 

He   then   shows   from   the   context   of   Isaiah, 
chap,  viii.,  how  Ahaz 

took  two  witnesses,  and  in  their  presence  went 
unto  the  said  virgin,  or  young  woman,  called 
the  Prophetess  (verse  3),  who  in  due  time 
conceived  and  bare  a  son,  who  was  named 
Immanuel;  after  whose  birth,  the  projects 
of  Rezin  and  Pekah  (Is.  viii.,  8-10)  were 
soon  confounded,  according  to  the  Prophecy 
and  Sign  given  by  the  prophet. 

The  sign  (Isaiah  vii.,  14)  was 

given  by  the  prophet  to  convince  Ahaz  that 
he  (the  prophet)  brought  a  message  from 
the  Lord  to  him  to  assure  him  that  the  two 
kings  should  not  succeed  against  him. 
How  could  a  virgin's  conception  and  bearing 
a  son  seven  hundred  years  afterwards  be  a 
sign  to  Ahaz  that  the  prophet  came  to  him 
with  the  said  message  from  the  Lord? 


The  Deists  53 

And  how  useless  was  it  to  Ahaz,  as  well  as 
absurd  in  itself,  for  the  prophet  to  say: 
Before  the  child,  born  seven  hundred  years 
hence,  shall  distinguish  between  good  and 
evil,  the  land  shall  be  forsaken  of  both  her 
kings? — which  should  seem  a  banter,  instead 
of  a  sign.  But  a  prophecy  of  the  certain 
birth  of  a  male  child  to  be  born  within  a 
year  or  two  seems  a  proper  sign.  .  .  . 

Similarly  he  points  out  that  the  words  of 
Hosea  cited  in  Matt,  ii.,  15,  were  no  prediction, 
but  a  statement  of  a  past  fact — viz.,  that 
Jehovah  had  brought  Israel  his  son  out  of 
Egypt. 

Collins  also  undertook  to  show  that  the  Book 
of  Daniel,  on  which  his  antagonist  Whiston 
relied,  was  a  forgery  of  the  age  of  Antiochus 
Epiphanes.  This  brilliant  conjecture,  which 
modern  inquiry  has  substantiated,  of  itself 
suffices  to  place  him  in  the  foremost  rank  of 
critics.  Bentley,  the  King's  librarian,  indulged 
in  gibes,  as  cheap  as  they  were  coarse,  at  Col- 
lins's  mistakes  in  the  domain  of  scholarship; 
but  here  was  a  discovery  which,  had  Bentley 
known  it,  far  outshone  in  importance,  while  it 
rivalled  in  critical  insight,  his  own  exposure  in 
1699  of  the  Epistles  of  Phalaris,  the  genuineness 
of  which  was  at  the  time  an  article  of  faith  in 
Oxford  colleges. 

The  other  writer  of  this  age  who  must  be  set 
alongside  of  Collins  as  a  critic  of  the  New  Testa- 


54  New  Testament  Criticism 

ment  was  Thomas  Woolston  (1699-1731).  The 
general  position  of  this  writer  was  that  the 
miracles  related  of  Jesus  are  so  unworthy  of  a 
spiritual  Messiah  that  they  must  one  and  all, 
including  the  resurrection,  be  set  down  as  never 
having  happened  at  all,  and  be  explained  alle- 
gorically  as  types  or  figures  of  the  real,  which 
is  the  spiritual,  alone.  I  reproduce  in  his  own 
words,  from  his  Discourse  on  the  Miracles,  sixth 
edition,  London,  1729,  p.  7,  his  programme: 

I  will  show  that  the  miracles  of  healing 
all  manner  of  bodily  diseases,  which  Jesus 
was  justly  famed  for,  are  none  of  the  proper 
miracles  of  the  Messiah,  nor  are  they  so 
much  as  a  good  proof  of  Jesus'  divine 
authority  to  found  and  introduce  a  religion 
into  the  world. 

And  to  do  this  let  us  consider,  first,  in 
general,  what  was  the  opinion  of  the  Fathers 
about  the  Evangelists,  in  which-  the  life  of 
Christ  is  recorded.  Eucherius  says  that 
the  scriptures  of  the  New  as  well  as  Old 
Testament  are  to  be  interpreted  in  an  alle- 
gorical sense.  And  this  his  opinion  is  no 
other  than  the  common  one  of  the  first  ages 
of  the  Church  .  .  .  consequently  the  literal 
story  of  Christ's  miracles  proves  nothing. 
But  let  's  hear  particularly  their  opinion  of 
the  actions  and  miracles  of  our  Saviour. 
Origen  says  that  whatsoever  Jesus  did  in  the 
flesh  was  but  typical  and  symbolical  of  what  he 
would  do  in  the  spirit;  and  to  our  purpose, 
that  the  several  bodily  diseases  which  he  healed 


The  Deists  55 

were  no  other  than  figures  of  the  spiritual 
infirmities  of  the  soul,  that  are  to  be  cured  by 
him. 

The  following  are  some  of  the  results  at  which 
he  arrives  by  applying  the  above  canon : 

Jesus'  feedings  of  five  and  four  thousand  in 
the  wilderness  "are  most  romantick  tales/' 

The  miracle  of  Mark  ii.,  1-12  =  Luke  v.,  17-26 
is  "such  a  rodomontado  that,  were  men  to 
stretch  for  a  wager,  against  reason  and  truth, 
none  could  outdo  it." 

He  also  banters  the  spittle  miracle  (in  John 
ix.) 

of  the  blind  man,  for  whom  eye-salve  was 
made  of  clay  and  spittle;  which  eye-salve, 
whether  it  was  Balsamick  or  not,  does  equally 
affect  the  credit  of  the  miracle.  If  it  was 
naturally  medicinal,  there  's  an  end  of  the 
miracle;  and  if  it  was  not  medicinal,  it  was 
foolishly  and*  impertinently  apply'd,  and 
can  be  no  otherwise  accounted  for  than  by 
considering  it,  with  the  Fathers,  as  a 
figurative  act  in  Jesus  (p.  55). 

Of  another  famous  tale  he  writes : 

Jesus'  cursing  the  fig-tree,  for  its  not 
bearing  fruit  out  of  season,  upon  the  bare 
mention  of  it,  appears  to  be  a  foolish,  absurd, 
and  ridiculous  act,  if  not  figurative.  ...  It 
is  so  like  the  malignant  practices  of  witches, 


56  New  Testament  Criticism 

who,  as  stories  go,  upon  envy,  grudge,  or 
distaste,  smite  their  neighbours'  cattle  with 
languishing  distempers,  till  they  die. 

And  thus  of  the  Magi : 

Of  the  Wise  Men  out  of  the  East,  with 
their  (literally)  senseless  and  ridiculous 
presents  of  frankincense  and  myrrh,  to  a 
new-born  babe.  If  with  their  gold,  which 
could  be  but  little,  they  had  brought  their 
dozens  of  sugar,  soap,  and  candles,  which 
would  have  been  of  use  to  the  child  and  his 
poor  mother  in  the  straw,  they  had  acted 
like  wise  as  well  as  good  men  (p.  56). 

From  the  Fourth  Discourse  on  the  Miracles, 
London,  1729,  p.  36,  on  the  miracle  of  Cana : 

Jesus,  after  their  more  than  sufficient 
drinking  for  their  satisfaction  of  nature,  had 
never  turned  water  into  wine,  nor  would  his 
mother  have  requested  him  to  do  it,  if,  I  say, 
they  had  not  a  mind,  and  took  pleasure  in 
it  too,  to  see  the  company  quite  stitch* d 
up.  .  .  . 

The  Fathers  of  your  Church,  being  sen- 
sible of  the  absurdity,  abruptness,  imperti- 
nence, pertness,  and  senselessness  of  the 
passage  before  us  according  to  the  letter,  had 
recourse  to  a  mystical  and  allegorical  inter- 
pretation, as  the  only  way  to  make  it  con- 
sistent with  the  wisdom,  sobriety,  and  duty 
of  the  Holy  Jesus  (p.  35). 


The  Deists  57 

In  his  sixth  discourse  on  the  miracles  Woolston 
assails  the  narratives  of  the  Resurrection.  He 
evidently  felt  that  he  was  running  some  risk  of 
prosecution  and  imprisonment  by  his  freedom 
of  speech,  so  he  puts  the  chief  of  his  argument 
into  the  mouth  of  an  imaginary  Jewish  rabbi. 
The  latter  begins  by  lamenting  the  loss  of  the 
writings  which,  according  to  Justin  Martyr 
(c.  130-140),  his  own  ancestors  unquestionably 
dispersed  against  Jesus.  These,  if  we  had 
them,  would,  he  avers,  yield  us  a  clear  insight 
into  the  cheat  and  imposture  of  the  Christian 
religion. 

He  then  proceeds  to  argue  that  the  priests 
who  sealed  the  sepulchre  waited  for  Jesus  to  rise 
again  after  three  days — i.e.y  on  Monday — but 
that  the  disciples  stole  a  march  on  them  by 
removing  the  body  a  day  earlier,  and  then  pre- 
tended the  sense  of  the  prophecy  to  be  that  he 
should  rise  on  the  third  day.  The  disciples 
were 

afraid  to  trust  Jesus'  body,  its  full  time,  in 
the  grave,  because  of  the  greater  difficulty 
to  carry  it  off  afterwards,  and  pretend  a 
resurrection  upon  it.  ... 

Jesus'  body  was  gone  betimes  in  the 
morning,  before  our  chief  priests  could  be  out 
of  their  beds;  and  a  bare-faced  infringement 
of  the  seals  of  the  sepulchre,  was  made  against 
the  laws  of  honour  and  honesty.  .  .  . 

In  short,   by  the   sealing  of  the   stone  of 


58  New  Testament  Criticism 

the  sepulchre  we  are  to  understand  nothing 
less  than  a  covenant  entered  into  between 
our  chief  priests  and  the  Apostles,  by  which 
Jesus*  veracity,  power,  and  Messiahship 
was  to  be  try'd.  .  .  .The  condition  of  the 
sealed  covenant  was  that  if  Jesus  arose  from 
the  dead  in  the  presence  of  our  chief  priests, 
upon  their  opening  the  seals  of  the  sepulchre, 
at  the  time  appointed;  then  he  was  to  be 
acknowledged  to  be  the  Messiah.  But  if  he 
continued  in  a  corrupt  and  putrified  state, 
then  was  he  to  be  granted  to  be  an  impostor. 
Very  wisely  and  rightly  agreed!  And  if  the 
Apostles  had  stood  to  this  covenant,  Christ- 
ianity had  been  nipped  in  its  bud  and  sup- 
pressed at  its  birth. 

He  anticipates  the  objection  that  the  theft 
could  not  have  escaped  the  notice  of  the  soldiers 
set  to  guard  the  tomb.  These  were  either 
bribed  or,  as  "our  ancestors  said,  what  your 
evangelist  has  recorded,"  asleep. 

The  rabbi  next  raises  the  objection  that  Jesus 
appeared  to  none  except  the  faithful: 

Celsus  of  old,  in  the  name  of  the  Jews, 
made  the  objection,  and  Olivio,  a  later  rabbi, 
has  repeated  it.  But  in  all  my  reading  and 
conversation  with  men  or  books  I  never  met 
with  a  tolerable  answer  to  it. 

.  .  .  This  objection  Origen  owns  to  be  a 
considerable  one  in  his  second  book  against 
Celsus. 

Whoever  blends  together  the  various  his- 


The  Deists  59 

tory  of  the  four  Evangelists  as  to  Jesus' 
appearances  after  his  resurrection  will  find 
himself  not  only  perplex 'd  how  to  make  an 
intelligible,  consistent,  and  sensible  story  of 
it,  but  must,  with  Celsus,  needs  think  it,  if 
he  closely  think  on  't,  like  some  of  the  con- 
fused and  incredible  womanish  fables  of  the 
apparitions  of  the  ghosts  of  deceased  persons, 
which  the  Christian  world  in  particular  has 
in  former  ages  abounded  with.  The  ghosts 
of  the  dead  in  this  present  age,  and  especially 
in  this  Protestant  country,  have  ceased  to 
appear;  and  we  nowadays  hardly  ever  hear 
of  such  an  apparition.  And  what  is  the 
reason  of  it?  Why,  the  belief  of  these 
stories  being  banish'd  out  of  men's  minds, 
the  crafty  and  vaporous  forbear  to  trump 
them  upon  us.  There  has  been  so  much 
clear  proof  of  the  fraud  in  many  of  these 
stories  that  the  wise  and  considerate  part  of 
mankind  has  rejected  them  all,  excepting 
this  of  Jesus,  which,  to  admiration,  has  stood 
its  ground.  .  .  . 

I  can't  read  the  story  without  smiling, 
and  there  are  two  or  three  passages  in  it  that 
put  me  in  mind  of  Robinson  Crusoe's  filling 
his  pockets  with  biskets,  when  he  had  neither 
coat,  waistcoat,  nor  breeches  on. 

I  don't  expect  my  argument  against  it 
[the  Resurrection]  will  be  convincing  of  any 
of  your  preachers.  They  have  a  potent 
reason  for  their  faith,  which  we  Jews  can't 
come  at;  or  I  don't  know  but  we  might 
believe  with  them. 

That  the  Fathers,  without  questioning 
their  belief  of  Jesus'  corporal  Resurrection, 


6o  New  Testament  Criticism 

universally  interpreted  the  story  and  every 
part  of  it  mystically,  is  most  certain. 

He  cites  Hilary  in  behalf  of  this  conten- 
tion; also  Augustine,  Sermo  clxviii.,  Appendix; 
Origen  in  Johan.  Evang.,  C.  xx.,  Tract  120; 
John  of  Jerusalem,  In  Matt.,  c.  xx.;  Jerome,  In 
Mattk&um;  and  then  sums  up  his  case  in  the 
following  words: 


What  I  have  said  in  a  few  citations  is 
enough  to  show  that  they  looked- upon  the 
whole  story  as  emblematical  of  his  Spiritual 
Resurrection  out  of  the  grave  of  the  letter  of 
the  Scriptures,  in  which  he  has  been  buried 
about  three  days  and  three  nights,  according 
to  that  mystical  interpretation  of  prophetical 
Numbers  which  I  have  learned  of  them  .  .  " 
by  the  three  Days,  St.  Augustine  says,  are 
to  be  understood  three  ages  of  the  world. 

I  am  resolved  to  give  the  Letter  of  the 
Scripture  no  rest,  so  long  as  God  gives  me 
life  and  abilities  to  attack  it.  Origen  (in 
Psalm  xxx vi.)  says  that,  when  we  dispute 
against  Ministers  of  the  Letter,  we  must  select 
some  historical  parts  of  Scripture,  which  they 
understand  literally,  and  show  that,  according 
to  the  Letter,  they  cant  stand  their  ground,  but 
imply  absurdities  and  nonsense.  And  how 
then  is  such  a  work  to  be  performed  to  best 
advantage?  Is  it  to  be  done  in  a  grave, 
sedate,  and  serious  manner?  No,  I  think 
ridicule  should  here  take  place  of  sober 
reasoning,  as  the  more  proper  and  effectual 


The  Deists  61 

means  to  cure  men  of  their  foolish  faith  and 
absurd  notions. 

I  have  cited  Woolston's  argument  against  the 
Resurrection  so  fully  in  order  to  give  my  readers 
an  adequate  idea  of  his  method.  It  is  old- 
fashioned,  no  doubt,  as  compared  with  the  much 
subtler  criticism  of  the  Abbd  Loisy,  who  chal- 
lenges the  story  of  the  empty  tomb  altogether, 
and  argues  that,  Jesus  having  been  really  cast 
after  death  into  the  common  foss  or  Hakeldama 
into  which  other  malefactors'  bodies  were  thrown, 
the  story  of  the  women's  visit  to  the  empty 
tomb  was  invented  to  buttress  the  growing 
belief  in  a  bodily  resurrection,  such  as  became  a 
messiah  who  was  to  return  and  inaugurate  an 
earthly  millennium.  As  against  the  traditional 
acceptance  of  the  narratives,  however,  Wool- 
ston's arguments  are  effective  enough.  His 
method  of  ridicule  was,  of  course,  adopted  by 
Voltaire,  who  was  living  in  England  when  he  and 
Collins  were  writing.  Voltaire,  indeed,  would 
have  been  the  first  to  laugh  at  the  method  of 
allegory  by  which  the  two  English  Deists  sought 
to  quicken  into  spiritual  meanings  the  letter 
which  killeth  by  its  absurdities.  Needless  to 
relate,  this  saving  use  of  allegory  did  not  avail  to 
protect  Woolston  from  public  insults,  prosecu- 
tions, and  imprisonment.  He  was  twice 
attacked  by  zealots  in  front  of  his  house,  and 


62  New  Testament  Criticism 

was  in  the  King's  Bench  tried  before  a  jury  who 
found  him  guilty  of  blasphemy.  He  was  fined 
a  hundred  pounds,  and,  being  unable  to  pay, 
he  went  to  prison  for  the  last  four  years  of  his 
life.  The  mere  titles  of  the  books  written  to 
answer  him  sufficiently  indicate  the  odium 
they  excited.  Here  are  two  of  these  titles: 

Tom  of  Bedlam's  short  letter  to  his 
cozen  Tom  Woolston,  occasioned  by  his  late 
discourses  on  the  miracles  of  our  Saviour. 
London,  1728. 

For  God  or  the  Devil,  or  just  chastise- 
ment no  persecution,  being  the  Christian's 
cry  to  the  legislature  for  exemplary  punish- 
ment of  publick  and  pernicious  blasphemers, 
particularly  that  wretch  Woolston,  who  has 
impudently  and  scurrilously  turned  the 
miracles  of  our  Saviour  into  ridicule.  Lon- 
don, 1728. 

The  question  remains  whether  Collins  and 
Woolston  were  sincere  in  their  advocacy  of  an 
allegorical  interpretation  of  the  Bible.  I  feel 
sure  that  Collins  was,  but  not  that  Woolston 
was  so,  at  any  rate  in  his  latest  works.  The 
worst  of  them  were  dedicated  in  insulting  terms 
to  English  bishops  of  note,  whom  he  invariably 
characterised  as  hireling  priests  and  apostates. 
For  Whiston,  who  as  a  professed  Arian  was 
hardly  less  offensive  to  the  clergy  than  himself, 
Woolston  ever  retained  his  respect,  though,  like 


The  Deists  63 

Collins,  he  forfeited  his  friendship.  On  the 
whole,  there  is  much  to  be  said  for  Leslie  Stephen's 
verdict  that  the  study  of  Origen  or  some  similar 
cause  had  disordered  his  intellect.  In  other 
words,  he  was  a  religious  crank. 

However  this  be,  there  is  one  aspect  of  these 
two  Deists  which  escaped  their  contemporaries 
and  all  who  have  since  written  about  them.  It 
is  this,  that  in  dismissing  the  historical  reality 
of  Christ's  miracles  in  favour  of  an  exclusively 
symbolic  interpretation  they  exactly  took  up 
the  attitude  of  the  medieval  Cathars,  called 
sometimes  Albigensians,  sometimes  Patarenes. 
Thus  in  an  old  imaginary  dialogue  of  the 
twelfth  or  thirteenth  century,  written  by  a 
Catholic  against  these  heretics,  the  Catholic  asks: 
"Why,  like  Christ  and  the  Apostles,  do  you  not 
work  visible  signs? M  And  the  Patarene  answers: 

Even  yet  a  veil  is  drawn  in  your  hearts, 
if  you  believe  that  Christ  and  his  apostles 
worked  visible  signs.  The  letter  killeth, 
but  the  spirit  quickeneth.  Ye  must  there- 
fore understand  things  in  a  spiritual  sense, 
and  not  imagine  that  Christ  caused  the  soul 
of  Lazarus  to  return  to  his  corpse;  but  only 
that,  in  converting  him  to  his  faith,  he 
resuscitated  one  that  was  dead  as  a  sinner  is 
dead,  and  had  lain  four  days,  and  so  stunk 
in  his  desperate  state. 

These   curious   heretics,    the   descendants   of 


64  New  Testament  Criticism 

Marcion  and  Mani,  held  that,  as  matter  was  an 
evil  creation,  Christ,  a  spiritual  and  divine  being, 
could  not  have  wrought  material  miracles;  he 
could  not  pollute  himself  by  contact  with  matter. 
He  only  appeared  to  the  eye  to  work  material 
signs,  just  as  he  appeared  to  the  eye  to  have  a 
human  body,  though,  in  fact,  he  shared  not  our 
flesh  and  blood.  His  birth,  therefore,  no  less 
than  his  death  and  resurrection,  were  only  fan- 
tastic appearances,  and  not  real  events. 

It  is  strange  to  find  Woolston  reproducing 
these  earlier  forms  of  opinion.  Did  he  blunder 
into  them  by  himself,  or  did  he,  through  some 
obscure  channel,  inherit  them?  If  we  consider 
that  these  medieval  heretics  were  in  the  direct 
pedigree  of  some  of  the  Quaker  and  Anabaptist 
sects  which  in  the  seventeenth  century  swarmed 
in  England,  Holland,  and  Germany,  it  is  not 
impossible  that  he  picked  up  the  idea  from  some 
of  his  contemporaries. 


CHAPTER  IV 
THE  EVANGELISTS 

A  LEADING  writer  of  the  Latin  Church,  the 
Rev.   Joseph   Rickaby,   in   an   essay   on 
"One  Lord  Jesus  Christ/'  in  a  volume  entitled 
Jesus    or    Christ,    London,   1909,    p.    139,    has 
written  as  follows: 

At  the  outset  of  the  argument  it  is 
necessary  to  define  my  controversial  position 
in  reference  to  the  books  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment. Never  have  documents  been  attacked 
A  with  greater  subtlety  and  vehemence:  at 
the  end  of  forty  years'  fighting  they  have 
emerged  in  the  main  victorious;  their  essen- 
tial value  has  been  proved  as  it  never  had 
been  proved  before. 

That  Dr.  Rickaby  is  easily  pleased  will  be  seen 
if  we  consider  the  results  of  those  forty  years  of 
criticism  as  they  are  accepted  by  a  daily  increas- 
ing number  of  clergymen  in  the  Roman,  Angli- 
can, and  Lutheran  Churches,  and  also  by  many 
Nonconformists.  In  the  first  place,  the  gospel 
called  " according  to  Matthew"  is  no  longer 
s  65 


66  New  Testament  Criticism 

allowed  to  be  from  the  pen  of  that  Apostle.  Here 
again  we  may  select  Dean  Alford  as  a  fair  re- 
presentative of  educated  opinion  fifty  years  ago. 
He  could  then  write  of  the  passage  Matt.,  viii.,  2 
ff.,  in  which  the  cleansing  of  a  leper  by  Jesus 
is  related,  as  follows: 

This  same  miracle  is  related  by  St.  Luke 
(ch.  v.,  12-14)  without  any  mark  of  definite- 
ness,  either  as  to  time  or  place.  .  .  .  The  plain 
assertion  of  the  account  in  the  text  requires 
that  the  leper  should  have  met  our  Lord  on 
his  descent  from  the  mountain,  while  great 
multitudes  were  following  him.  ...  I  conceive 
it  highly  probable  that  St.  Matthew  was 
himself  a  hearer  of  the  sermon  (on  the  mount) 
and  one  of  those  who  followed  our  Lord  at 
this  time. 

And  again,  in  reference  to  the  passage  ix.,  9, 
where  the  publican  called  by  Jesus  to  be  an 
apostle  is  called  Matthew,  in  contradiction  of 
the  other  two  gospels,  which  give  his  name  as 
Levi,  Alford  could  write  that  ''it  is  probable 
enough  that  Matthew,  in  his  own  gospel,  would 
mention  only  his  apostolic  name,'*  and  that  "in 
this  case,  when  he  of  all  men  must  have  been 
best  informed,  his  own  account  is  the  least  pre- 
cise of  the  three."  And  in  his  Prolegomena,  in 
ch.  ii.,  he  begins  the  section  upon  the  authorship 
of  this  gospel  with  the  words : 

The  author  of  this  gospel  has  been  uni- 


The  Evangelists  67 

versally  believed  to  be  the  Apostle  Matthew. 
With  this  belief  the  contents  of  the  gospel 
are  not  inconsistent,  and  we  find  it  current 
in  the  very  earliest  ages. 

Alford  also  believed  that  the  three  Synoptic 
Gospels  substantially  embody  the  testimony  the 
Apostles  gave  of  Christ's  ministry,  from  his 
baptism  by  John  until  his  ascension;  that  this 
testimony  was  chiefly  collected  from  the  oral 
teaching  current  among  the  catechists  of  the 
Church,  but  in  part  from  written  documents 
as  well  which  reflected  the  teaching.  He  was 
furthermore  convinced  that  no  one  "of  the 
three  evangelists  had  access  to  either  of  the  two 
gospels  in  its  present  form."  He  was  loth  to 
believe  that  Matthew,  an  Apostle,  was  a  debtor 
to  either  of  the  others,  not  only  for  the  order  in 
which  he  arranges  the  events  of  the  ministry  of 
Jesus,  but  also  for  great  blocks  of  his  texts.  Yet 
that  Matthew  was  so  indebted  to  Mark  is  an 
axiom  with  modern  orthodox  critics.  The 
first  gospel  is  universally  allowed  to-day  to  be 
a  compilation  by  an  unknown  writer  of  two 
ulterior  documents — namely,  Mark  and  the 
non-Marcan  document  already  mentioned.1 

In  another  work,  Myth,  Magic,  and  Morals,  I 
have  advised  my  readers  to  take  a  red  pencil  and 
underline  in  the  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Luke 
all  the  phrases,  sentences,  and  entire  narratives 

1  See  page  25. 


68  New  Testament  Criticism 

which  agree  verbally  with  Mark,  so  that  they 
may  realise  for  themselves  how  little  of  Mark  is 
left  that  is  not  either  in  Matthew  or  in  Luke. 
Or,  conversely,  they  may  underline  in  Mark  all 
words  or  parts  of  words  that  are  found  in  the 
other  two  gospels.  In  the  latter  case  they  will 
find  that  they  have  underlined  almost  the  whole 
of  Mark.  The  only  explanation  is  that  both 
the  others  used  Mark;  and  accordingly  Dr. 
Armitage  Robinson,  a  fairly  conservative  critic, 
writes  in  his  work  on  The  Study  of  the  Gospels 
as  follows: 

I  think  that  the  impression  gained  by 
any  one  who  will  take  the  trouble  to  do  what 
I  have  suggested  (viz.,  underline  common 
words,  etc.)  will  certainly  be  that  St.  Mark's 
Gospel  lay  before  the  other  two  evangelists, 
and  that  they  used  it  very  freely,  and 
between  them  embodied  almost  the  whole 
of  it. 

Accordingly  Dr.  Robinson  boldly  asserts  (p. 
101)  the  first  gospel  to  be  the  work  of  an  un- 
known writer,  and  warns  his  readers  to  prefer 
either  Luke  or  Mark  or  the  reconstructed  non- 
Marcan  document  to  Matthew: 

From  the  historical  point  of  view  he 
cannot  feel  a  like  certainty  in  dealing  with 
statements  which  are  only  attested  by  the 
unknown  writer  of  the  first  gospel. 

Here,  then,  we  see  a  gospel  that  had  all  the 


The  Evangelists  69 

prestige  of  apostolic  authorship,  and  the  only 
one  of  the  synoptics  that  had  that  prestige, 
debased  to  the  level  of  an  anonymous  compila- 
tion, of  less  value  for  the  historian  than  either  of 
the  other  two.  The  one  synoptic  evangelist  on 
whom  Alford  thought  he  could  depend,  just 
because  he  had  seen  things  with  his  own  eyes, 
turns  out  to  be  no  apostle  at  all,  but  an  anony- 
mous copyist.  Will  Father  Rickaby,  in  the 
face  of  such  facts,  continue  to  assert,  of  the  first 
gospel  at  all  events,  that  "its  essential  value  has 
been  proved  as  it  never  had  been  proved 
before"? 

And  in  this  connection  it  is  instructive  to 
note  how  the  same  hypothesis — viz.,  of  Mat- 
thew's (and  Luke's)  dependence  on  Mark,  and 
of  Mark's  priority — is  regarded  by  two  Anglican 
deans,  respectively  before  and  after  its  accept- 
ance. A  certain  Mr.  Smith,  of  Jordanhill,  in  a 
Dissertation  on  the  Origin  and  Connection  of  the 
Gospels  (Edinburgh,  1853),  to  which  I  shall 
return  later,  argued  that  oral  tradition  was  not 
adequate  to  explain  the  identities  of  word  and 
narrative  which  pervade  the  Synoptic  Gospels; 
and  he  brought  to  a  test  the  arguments  on  which 
the  hypothesis  of  an  oral  tradition  and  narra- 
tive underlying  them  was  based.  That  argu- 
ment may  fitly  be  given  in  the  very  words  of 
Dean  Alford,  who  believed  in  it.  They  are  these 
(Prolegomena,  ch.  i.,  §  3,  6): 


70  New  Testament  Criticism 

While  they  [the  Apostles]  were  princi- 
pally together,  and  instructing  the  converts 
at  Jerusalem,  such  narrative  would  naturally 
be  for  the  most  part  the  same,  and  expressed 
in  the  same,  or  nearly  the  same,  words :  coin- 
cident, however,  not  from  design  or  rule,  but 
because  the  things  themselves  were  the  same; 
and  the  teaching  naturally  fell  for  the  most 
part  into  one  form. 

Mr.  Smith  brought  this  argument  to  the  test 
of  experience  by  an  examination  of  how  far  and 
why  modern  historians  like  Suchet,  Alison,  and 
Napier,  narrating  the  same  events,  can  approxi- 
mate to  one  another.  He  proved  that  they  only 
agree  verbally,  as  the  Synoptic  Gospels  agree, 
where  they  copied  either  one  the  other  or  all 
common  documents,  and  that  where  they  did 
not  so  copy  they  did  not  agree. 

"Reasons  could  be  assigned,"  answers  Dean 
Alford,  "for  the  adoption  or  rejection  by  the 
posterior  writer  of  the  words  and  clauses  of  the 
prior  one."  "Let  the  student,"  he  continues, 
"attempt  such  a  rationale  of  any  narrative  com- 
mon to  the  three  gospels,  on  any  hypothesis  of 
priority,  and  he  will  at  once  perceive  its  impracti- 
cability. If  Matthew,  Mark,  and  Luke  are  to 
be  judged  by  the  analogy  of  Suchet,  Alison, 
and  Napier,  the  inference  must  be  that,  whereas 
the  historians  were  intelligent  men,  acting  by 
the  rules  of  mental  association  and  selection,  the 
evangelists  were  mere  victims  of  caprice,  and 


The  Evangelists  71 

such  caprice  as  is  hardly  consistent  with  the 
possession  of  a  sound  mind." 

This  argument  is  unaffected  by  the  circum- 
stance that  Matthew  and  Luke  both  copied 
Mark,  instead  of  all  three  having  (as  was  sup- 
posed by  Mr.  Smith)  copied  common,  but  now 
vanished,  ulterior  documents.  What  I  desire  to 
set  on  record  is  the  condemnation  Dean  Alford 
is  ready  to  mete  out  to  Matthew  and  Luke  in 
case  they  be  proved  to  owe  their  mutual  approxi- 
mations, not  to  a  common  oral  tradition,  but  to 
common  documents.  According  to  the  present 
Dean  of  Westminster,  that  case  was  the  real  one. 
Dean  Alford  then,  who  was  no  mean  scholar  and 
exegete,  admitted  by  anticipation  that  the  first 
and  third  evangelists  displayed  an  almost  insane 
caprice  in  the  handling  of  th^ir  sources.  In 
adopting  here  and  rejecting  there  the  words  and 
clauses  of  their  sources  they  obeyed  no  rules  of 
mental  association  or  selection.  In  fine,  Dean 
Alford,  were  he  alive  to-day,  would  have  to  con- 
demn Matthew  and  Luke  for  the  arbitrariness 
of  their  methods  of  compilation,  in  which  he 
would  discern  no  rhyme  or  reason.  What,  then, 
becomes  of  Dr.  Rickaby's  boast  that  after  forty 
years*  fighting  his  documents  have  emerged  in 
the  main  victorious? 

With  Alford' s  judgment,  however,  let  t& 
contrast  that  of  Dean  Robinson,  who,  I  believe, 
has  always  rejected  that  hypothesis  of  a  com- 


72  New  Testament  Criticism 

mon  oral  source,  in  which,  like  Alford,  his 
master,  Dr.  Westcott  acquiesced.  He  tells  us 
that  he  entertained  for  a  time  the  hypothesis  of 
the  use  by  all  three  evangelists  of  a  common 
document,  but  finally  dismissed  it  as  "cumber- 
some and  unnecessary,  and  adopted  the  view 
that  the  first  and  third  embodied  St.  Mark  in 
their  respective  gospels."1  As  to  this  "embodi- 
ment of  St.  Mark  by  the  two  subsequent 
writers,"  he  holds  that  "it  is  not  a  slavish 
copying,  but  an  intelligent  and  discriminating 
appropriation. ' ' 

For  myself,  I  am  of  opinion  that  the  truth 
lies  between  Dean  Alford  and  Dean  Robinson. 
Matthew  and  Luke  are  indeed  capricious  in 
what  they  reject  and  what  they  adopt  of  Mark, 
but  their  caprice  cannot  be  stigmatised  as 
insane.  It  is  only  what  we  might  expect  of  com- 
pilers who,  living  in  uncritical  and  uncultivated 
circles,  had  no  idea  of  using  their  sources  in  the 
careful  and  scrupulous  manner  in  which  a 
scientific  historian  of  to-day  would  use  them. 
Mark  did  not  reach  their  hands  as  a  canonical 
Scripture  invested  with  authority;  and  in  the 
view  of  one  of  them,  Matthew,  it  was  much 
more  important  that  the  events  of  Jesus'  life 
should  coincide  with  certain  Messianic  prophe- 
cies (as  they  were  held  to  be)  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment than  with  the  narrative  of  Mark.  For 

1  See  The  Study  of  the  Gospels,  p.  28. 


DR.  WESTCOTT 
73 


74  New  Testament  Criticism 

several  years  I  have  occupied  my  spare  time  in 
comparing  and  sifting  the  narratives  of  the 
lives  and  martyrdoms  of  the  Saints  of  the 
Church  collected  by  the  Jesuits  in  their  vast 
series  of  volumes  called  the  Ada  Sanctorum. 
In  these  we  can  often  trace  the  fortunes  of  an 
originally  simple,  naive,  and  veracious  narrative. 
Later  hagiologists,  intent  on  edification,  pad 
out  this  narrative  with  commonplace  miracles, 
stuff  their  own  vulgar  exhortations  and  admoni- 
tions in  the  mouths  of  the  original  actors, 
eliminate  all  local  colour,  and  bowdlerise  the 
text  to  suit  a  later  stage  of  dogmatic  develop- 
ment. Compared  with  such  writers,  it  seems 
to  me  that  Matthew  and  Luke  treated  the 
probably  anonymous  doctrines  to  which  they 
owed  their  knowledge  of  Jesus  with  singular 
sobriety  and  self-restraint.  We  have  only  to 
compare  either  of  them  with  the  fourth  Gospel 
to  realise  how  much  the  art  of  portraying  Jesus 
could  decline  in  the  course  of  little  more  than  a 
generation. 

Both  Matthew  and  Luke  had  conceptions  of 
the  character  and  role  of  Jesus  based  partly  on 
reflections  of  their  own,  partly  on  the  growing 
prophetic  gnosis  of  the  age  in  obedience  to 
which  they  remodelled  Mark's  narrative.  Dean 
Robinson  (in  the  work  above  mentioned) 
remarks  that  in  Mark  the  emotions  of  anger, 
compassion,  complacence,  are  each  recorded  of 


The  Evangelists  75 

Jesus  three  times ;  grief,  agony,  surprise,  vehem- 
ence, each  once.  "Of  actions,"  he  continues, 
"we  have  'looking  around'  five  times,  'looking 
upon'  twice,  'looking  up'  once,  'turning'  thrice, 
' groaning'  twice,  'embracing  in  the  arms' 
twice,  'falling  down'  once.  Now,  in  the  parallel 
passages  of  Matthew  and  Luke,  we  find,"  he 
says,  "that  all  the  more  painful  emotions  dis- 
appear, with  one  exception  (agony).  Anger, 
grief,  groaning,  vehemence,  are  gone;  compas- 
sion remains  twice  in  St.  Matthew,  complacence 
(if  it  may  be  so  termed)  once  in  both." 

Nor  is  it  only  in  respect  of  Jesus  that  these 
"picturesque  details"  disappear.  The  figures 
of  the  disciples  are  purged  in  the  same  manner 
of  human  emotions.  "Perplexity  (five  times), 
amazement  (four),  fear  (four),  anger  (once), 
hardness  of  heart  (once),  drowsiness  (once)  are 
all  recorded  with  more  or  less  frequency  in 
St.  Mark.  But  in  the  other  evangelists  we  find 
the  same  tendency  to  eliminate  as  before."  It 
is  very  improbable  that  these  later  evangelists 
had  an  earlier  copy  of  Mark  from  which  these 
human  traits  in  the  portraiture  of  Jesus  and  his 
apostles  were  absent,  waiting  for  the  hand  of 
a  humanising  editor  to  fill  them  in.  Dean 
Robinson's  explanation  is  much  more  likely, 
that  this  suppression  of  emotional  attributes  in 
the  personce  dramatis  was  "the  result  of  a  kind 
of  reverence  which  belonged  to  a  slightly  later 


76  New  Testament  Criticism 

stage  of  reflection,  when  certain  traits  might  even 
seem  to  be  derogatory  to  the  dignity  of  the 
sacred  character  of  Christ  and  his  apostles." 

On  the  other  hand,  as  Dean  Robinson  subtly 
remarks,  the  wonderment  of  the  multitudes  at 
the  miracles  of  Jesus,  already  emphasised  in 
Mark,  is  still  further  exaggerated  in  the  later 
evangelists;  and,  as  for  the  adversaries  of 
Jesus,  "we  even  seem  to  discover  a  general 
tendency  both  in  St.  Matthew  and  in  St.  Luke 
to  expand  and  emphasise  the  notices  of  their 
hostility." 

This  is  the  best  sort  of  literary  criticism,  and 
it  really  marks  an  epoch  in  the  history  of  the 
Christian  religion  in  England  when  a  Dean  of 
Westminster  can  deliver  it  from  his  pulpit  and 
publish  it  in  a  book.  The  only  question  is  how 
far  it  tallies  with  his  assertion  that  the  two 
subsequent  writers  were  intelligent  and  dis- 
criminating in  their  appropriation  of  Mark's 
narrative.  Does  it  not  rather  show  how  swiftly 
the  process  was  in  progress  of  dehumanising 
Jesus,  of  converting  him  from  a  man  of  flesh 
and  blood  into  a  god,  gifted  with  the  ataraxia  or 
exemption  from  human  emotions  proper  to  the 
Stoic  ideal  sage  and  king?  This  development 
culminates  in  the  fourth  Gospel.  Pass  from 
the  defeated  and  tarnished,  peevish  and  vin- 
dictive, prisoner  of  Elba  to  the  majestic  hero 
enthroned  amid  silence  and  awe  in  the  spacious 


The  Evangelists  77 

temple  of  the  Invalides,  and  you  feel  that, 
mutatis  mutandis,  the  cult  of  Napoleon  between 
the  years  1815  and  1850  presents  a  certain 
analogy  with  the  deification  of  Jesus  between 
the  years  A.D.  70  and  120. 

<  Thus  the  early  tradition  that  Matthew,  as  for 
sake  of  brevity  I  designate  the  first  Gospel,  was 
the  work  of  an  apostle  and  eye-witness  has  been 
definitely  given  up.  It  is  possible  that  there 
may  have  been  some  truth  in  the  tradition 
preserved  by  Papias  about  A.D.  120-140  that 
Matthew  "  composed  the  logia  or  oracles  of  the 
Lord  in  the  Hebrew  tongue — i.e.,  in  the  Aramaic 
of  Palestine,  and  that  various  people  subse- 
quently rendered  these  logia  into  Greek  as  best 
they  could. "  Here  we  seem  to  get  our  only 
glimpse  at  the  pre-Greek  stage  of  the  evangelical 
tradition,  but  we  shall  never  know  whether  the 
word  logia  here  used  by  Papias  signified  a 
collection  of  sayings  or  of  narratives,  or  of  both 
together.  Many  scholars  to-day  believe  that 
Matthew's  Hebrew  logia  were  a  selection  of 
prophecies  of  Jesus  Christ  culled  from  the  Old 
Testament.  In  any  case  our  first  Gospel  is  no 
translation  of  the  document  attested  by  Papias ; 
for,  as  Dean  Robinson  remarks,  "our  St.  Mat- 
thew is  demonstrably  composed  in  the  main  out 
of  two  Greek  books,"  so  that  we  must  "  conclude 
either  that  Papias  made  a  mistake  in  saying 
that  St.  Matthew  wrote  in  Hebrew,  or  that  if  he 


78  New  Testament  Criticism 

wrote  in  Hebrew  his  work  has  perished  without 
leaving  a  trace  behind  it."  There  is  further- 
more a  statement  in  Irenaeus  (about  170-180) 
to  the  effect  that  Matthew  published  his  Gospel 
among  the  Jews  in  his  own  tongue  at  the  time 
that  Peter  and  Paul  were  preaching  the  Gospel 
in  Rome  and  founding  the  Church.  This  state- 
ment seems  to  be  independent  of  that  of  Papias, 
as  most  certainly  is  the  story  related  by  Euse- 
bius  of  Pantaenus,  the  catechist  of  Alexandria, 
and  teacher  of  Clement  and  Origen.  The  story 
runs  that  about  the  year  180  Pantaenus  visited 
India  and  found  the  natives  using  a  Gospel  of 
Matthew  written  in  Hebrew,  which  Bartholo- 
mew the  Apostle  had  conveyed  to  them.  Origen 
and  Eusebius  equally  believed  that  our  Matthew 
was  the  work  of  the  Apostle,  originally  composed 
in  Hebrew. 

It  surely  denotes  a  great  change,  almost 
amounting  to  a  revolution,  when  so  ancient  and 
well-attested  a  tradition  as  that  which  assigned 
the  first  Gospel  to  the  Apostle  Matthew  is  set 
aside  by  leaders  of  the  English  clergy;  before 
long  they  must  with  equal  candour  abandon  the 
yet  more  impossible  tradition  that  the  fourth 
Gospel  was  written  by  an  Apostle  and  eye-witness 
John,  the  son  of  Zebedee,  who  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Galatians  is  presented  to  us  by  Paul  as  a 
Judaiser  and  an  ally  of  James,  the  brother  of 
Jesus.  The  tradition  that  this  Apostle  wrote 


The  Evangelists  79 

this  Gospel  is  hardly  so  well  authenticated  as 
that  which  attested  the  apostolic  origin  of  the 
first  Gospel.  It  merely  amounts  to  this,  that  as 
a  child  Irenaeus  had  heard  Poly  carp,  who  died 
about  A.D.  155,  speak  of  John  the  Apostle.  But 
he  does  not  assert  that  Polycarp  attributed  the 
Gospel  to  the  apostle,  nor  is  the  occurrence  in  a 
surviving  letter  of  Polycarp  to  the  Philippians  of 
a  phrase  from  the  first  Epistle  of  John  proof  that 
Polycarp  either  knew  of  the  Gospel,  or,  if  he 
knew  of  it,  that  he  ascribed  it  to  John  any  more 
than  he  does  the  epistle.  It  is,  moreover, 
practically  certain  that  the  John  of  whom 
Irenaeus  in  his  boyhood  heard  Polycarp  speak 
was  not  the  apostle  but  the  Presbyter  John;  for 
Irenaeus  reports  that  Papias,  like  Polycarp,  was 
a  disciple  of  this  John,  whereas  Papias,  according 
to  the  testimony  of  Eusebius,  who  had  his  works 
in  his  library,  learned  not  from  John  the  Apostle 
but  from  John  the  Presbyter  much  of  what  he 
recorded  in  the  five  books  of  his  lost  Diegeseis, 
or  narratives.  Irenaeus,  therefore,  confused 
the  two  Johns.  The  external  evidence  of  the 
existence  of  this  Gospel  is  no  doubt  early  and 
ample,  but  it  is  chiefly  found  among  heretical 
and  gnostic  sects,  like  the  Ophites,  Perateans, 
Basilidians,  and  Valentinians ;  and  one  of  the 
latter,  Heracleon,  wrote  a  commentary  on  it. 
The  attribution  to  the  Apostle  John  was  pro- 
bably made  by  some  of  these  sects,  just  as  the 


8o  New  Testament  Criticism 

Basilidians  affected  to  have  among  them  a 
Gospel  of  Matthew,  and  as  in  other  circles  the 
so-called  Gospel  of  Peter  was  attributed  to  St. 
Peter  and  read  aloud  in  church  as  an  authentic 
work  of  that  Apostle.  If  the  fourth  Gospel 
took  its  origin  from  gnostic  circles,  we  can  quite 
well  understand  why  there  existed  so  early  in  the 
orthodox  Church  of  Asia  such  strong  prejudice 
against  it. 

It  is  not  long  ago  that  Canon  Liddon  declared 
in  his  B  amp  ton  Lectures  (1866)  that 

If  the  Book  of  Daniel  has  been  recently 
described  as  the  battlefield  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment, it  is  not  less  true  that  St.  John's  Gos- 
pel is  the  battlefield  of  the  New.  It  is  well 
understood  on  all  sides  that  no  question  of 
mere  dilettante  criticism  is  at  stake  when  the 
authenticity  of  St.  John's  Gospel  is  chal- 
lenged. .  .  .  For  St.  John's  Gospel  is  the 
most  conspicuous  written  attestation  to  the 
Godhead  of  Him  whose  claims  upon  man- 
kind can  hardly  be  surveyed  without  passion, 
whether  it  be  the  passion  of  adoring  love  or 
the  passion  of  vehement  determined  enmity. 

Nevertheless,  among  the  best  educated  Angli- 
cans there  is  a  tendency  to  give  up  the  fourth 
Gospel.  In  the  work  on  the  study  of  the 
Gospels  already  commended1  Dean  Robinson 
devotes  two  luminous  chapters  to  the  problem 
of  its  age  and  authorship.  Though  he  inclines 

1  See  pp.  68  /. 


The  Evangelists  81 

to  accept  it  as  a  work  written  by  the  apostle  in 
extreme  old  age,  he  is  nevertheless  not  without 
sympathy  for  those  who  reject  the  orthodox 
tradition.  " There  are,"  he  writes  (p.  128), 
"many  who  are  heartily  devoted  to  that  central 
truth  [i.e.,  of  the  divinity  of  Christ],  but  yet 
cannot  easily  persuade  themselves  that  the 
fourth  Gospel  offers  them  history  quite  in  the 
sense  that  the  other  Gospels  do,  cannot  think 
that  Christ  spoke  exactly  as  He  is  here  repre- 
sented as  speaking,  and  consequently  cannot 
feel  assured  that  this  is  the  record  of  an  eye- 
witness, or,  in  other  words,  the  writing  of  the 
apostle  St.  John." 

It  is  worth  while  to  cite  some  of  the  phrases  in 
which  Dr.  Robinson  describes  the  impression 
made  by  the  first  chapter  of  this  Gospel  (without 
going  any  further)  on  the  mind  of  one  who  has 
steeped  himself  in  the  study  of  the  three  Synop- 
tic Gospels: 

How  remote  do  these  theological  state- 
ments (in  the  prologue  of  the  fourth  Gospel) 
appear  from  a  Gospel  narrative  of  the  life 
of  Christ,  such  as  the  three  which  we  have 
been  hitherto  studying.  .  .  . 

Our  surprise  is  not  lessened  as  we  read  on. 
Great  abstract  conceptions  are  presented 
in  rapid  succession:  life,  light,  witness,  flesh, 
glory,  grace,  truth. 

Of  the  references  to  John  the  Baptist  in 
chap,  i.: 


82  New  Testament  Criticism 

We  are  back  on  the  earth  indeed;  but  ths 
scene  is  unfamiliar  and  the  voices  are  strange. 
We  hear  not  a  word  of  John's  preaching  of 
repentance,  or  even  of  his  baptism.  This  is 
no  comment  on  the  facts  we  know:  it  is  a 
new  story  altogether.  .  .  . 

If  a  wholly  new  story  of  the  beginnings 
of  discipleship  is  offered  us,  this  is  not  more 
startling  than  the  wholly  new  story  of  John's 
disclaimer  of  Messiahship.  .  .  . 

Here,  then,  is  a  fair  sample  of  the  diffi- 
culty which  this  Gospel  from  beginning  to 
end  presents  to  those  who  come  to  it  fresh 
from  the  study  of  the  Synoptic  narratives. 
The  whole  atmosphere  seems  different.  .  .  . 

Not  only  do  the  old  characters  appear 
in  new  situations — the  scene,  for  example, 
being  laid  mostly  in  Jerusalem  instead  of 
Galilee — but  the  utterances  of  all  the 
speakers  seem  to  bear  another  impress.  .  .  . 

At  times  it  is  not  possible  to  say  whether 
the  Lord  Himself  is  speaking,  or  whether  the 
evangelist  is  commenting  on  what  He  has 
said.  The  style  and  diction  of  speaker  and 
narrator  are  indistinguishable,  and  they  are 
notably  different  from  the  manner  in  which 
Christ  speaks  in  the  Synoptic  Gospels.  .  .  . 

I  do  not,  myself,  see  how  a  controversy  of 
this  kind  can  be  closed.  The  contrast  of 
which  we  have  spoken  cannot  be  removed; 
it  is  heightened  rather  than  diminished  as 
we  follow  it  into  details.  .  .  . 

Dean  Robinson  accepts,  then,  the  tradition  of 
apostolic  authorship,  but  hardly  on  terms  which 


The  Evangelists  83 

leave  to  the  Gospel  more  value  as  a  record  of  the 
historical  Jesus  than  the  dialogues  of  Plato  pos- 
sess as  a  record  of  the  historic  Socrates.  "It  is," 
he  avers,  "not  history  in  the  lower  sense  of 
a  contemporary  narrative  of  events  as  they 
appeared  to  the  youthful  onlooker:  not  an 
exact  reproduction  of  the  very  words  spoken 
by  Christ  or  to  Christ." 

And   below  he   pictures   the   author   of   this 
Gospel  as : 

"An  old  man,  disciplined  by  long  labour 
and  suffering,  surrounded  by  devoted 
scholars,  recording  before  he  passes  from 
them  his  final  conception  of  the  life  of  the 
Christ,  as  he  looked  back  upon  it  in  the 
light  of  fifty  years  of  Christian  experience. 
To  expect  that  after  such  an  interval  his 
memory  would  reproduce  the  past  with  the 
exactness  of  despatches  written  at  the  time 
would  be  to  postulate  a  miraculous  inter- 
ference with  the  ordinary  laws  which  govern 
human  memories. 

The  Christ  is  no  longer  "known  after  the 
flesh":  the  old  limitations  once  transcended 
cannot  be  reimposed.  A  glorious  vision 
results.  A  drama  is  enacted  in  which  every 
incident  tells,  or  it  would  not  be  there.  The 
record  moves  not  on  the  lines  of  the  ordinary 
succession  of  events  so  much  as  on  a  pathway 
of  ideas. 

And  once  more  he  says  of  the  author: 

He  can  no  longer  sever  between  the  fact 


84  New  Testament  Criticism 

and  the  truth  revealed  by  the  fact:  interpre- 
tation is  blended  with  event.  He  knows 
that  he  has  the  mind  of  Christ.  He  will 
say  what  he  now  sees  in  the  light  of  a  life  of 
discipleship. 

For  seventeen  hundred  years  the  theology 
which  lifts  Jesus  of  Nazareth  out  of  and  above 
human  history,  transforms  him  into  the  Word 
of  God,  which  triumphed  at  Nica3a  and  inspired 
Athanasius,  was  based  on  this  fourth  Gospel 
more  than  on  any  other  book  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment. From  it  as  from  an  armoury  the  par- 
tisans of  the  divinity  of  Jesus  Christ,  as  the 
Church  has  understood  and  formulated  that 
tenet  in  its  creeds  and  councils,  have  constantly 
drawn  their  weapons.  It  now  at  last  appears, 
by  the  admission  of  Dean  Robinson,  that  this 
entire  theological  fabric  was  woven  in  the  mind 
of  an  apostle  meditating  in  extreme  old  age  on 
the  half -forgotten  scenes  and  conversations  of  his 
youth.  Such  is  the  best  case  which  can  be  made 
out  for  orthodox  theology.  We  are  left  with 
the  roofless  ruins  of  the  stately  edifice  which 
sheltered  the  orthodox  doctors  of  the  past. 
And  even  these  ruins  totter  and  seem  to  endanger 
the  lives  of  the  shivering,  half -naked  figures  who 
seek  a  precarious  shelter  among  them.  Pro- 
fessor Sanday,  who  not  long  ago  tried  to  save  the 
apostolic  authorship  of  the  fourth  Gospel  by 
arguing  that  no  one  but  an  apostle  would  have 


The  Evangelists  85 

ventured  to  handle  with  so  much  freedom  the 
life  and  conversations  of  his  Master,  in  his  latest 
book  gives  signs  of  abandoning  altogether  the 
attribution  to  the  son  of  Zebedee.  The  impres- 
sion that  Dean  Robinson's  pages  leave  on  one's 
mind  is  that  a  real  follower  of  Jesus  could  never 
have  written  such  a  gospel,  though  he  him- 
self scruples  to  draw  the  conclusion  which  his 
premisses  warrant. 


CHAPTER  V 
TEXTUAL  CRITICISM 

THE  task  of  ascertaining  the  true  text  of  a 
classical  author,  of  Virgil  or  Tacitus,  of 
Euripides  or  Lysias,  is  far  simpler  and  less  per- 
plexed with  problems  than  that  of  ascertaining 
the  true  text  of  an  evangelist,  or  of  any  other 
New  Testament  writing.  In  the  case  of  pro- 
fane writers,  we  have  merely  to  collate  the 
manuscripts,  to  appraise  their  dates,  to  ascertain 
their  mutual  affinities,  to  draw  out,  if  there  be 
enough  material,  their  genealogy,  and  discover 
which  copies  embody  the  oldest  tradition;  to 
detect  and  exclude  the  mechanical  errors,  the 
slips  of  the  pen,  of  the  scribe;  to  restore  from 
the  work  of  one  copyist  passages  over  which, 
because  they  began  and  ended  with  the  same 
word  or  words,  the  eye  of  another  copyist  has 
glided,  leaving  a  lacuna  in  his  text.  When  all 
this  is  done  there  is  room  for  conjectural  emen- 
dators,  the  Porsons,  Bentleys,  Jebbs,  Hermanns, 
to  begin  and  exercise  their  ingenuity  on  pas- 
sages that  are  evidently  corrupt. 

None  of  this  labour  can  we  spare  ourselves  in 
86 


Textual  Criticism  87 

the  case  of  a  sacred  text,  so-called;  but  much 
more  awaits  us  besides.  The  profane  author's 
work  has  never  been  the  battle-ground  of  rival 
sects  and  creeds.  No  one  ever  asked  Plato  or 
Demosthenes  to  decide  whether  the  miracle  of 
the  miraculous  conception  and  birth  really 
happened,  whether  God  is  a  Trinity  or  no. 
They  are  no  arbiters  of  orthodoxy,  and  carry  no 
weight  in  the  question  of  whether  Mary  was 
the  mother  of  God  or  not,  or  whether  the  Son  is 
consubstantial  with  the  Father.  It  has  been 
far  otherwise  with  the  Gospels  and  the  rest  of 
the  New  Testament  ever  since  about  the  year 
200.  Until  then  Christians  were  so  much  pos- 
sessed with  the  dream  of  the  impending  disso- 
lution of  all  existing  societies  and  institutions  to 
make  way  for  their  own  millennium,  that  they 
paid  small  attention  to  their  scanty  records  of 
the  earthly  Christ,  except  so  far  as  they  were 
useful  to  confound  their  Jewish  antagonists. 
Authority  among  them  attached  not  to  written 
documents,  nor  to  priests  and  bishops,  but  to 
itinerant  prophets,  catechists,  and  ascetics. 
The  composition  of  the  Diatessaron,1  about  180, 
was  in  itself  no  indication  of  excessive  respect 
for  the  four  Gospels  conflated  or  fused  together, 
but  not  harmonised,  therein.  If  there  had 
already  then  existed  the  same  superstitious 

1  So  called  because  it  was  a  single  Gospel  produced  by 
fusing  together  the  four  which  still  survive. 


88  New  Testament  Criticism 

veneration  for  the  four  as  was  felt  a  hundred 
years  later,  Tatian  would  not  have  been  per- 
mitted to  make  such  a  compilation  of  them,  nor 
in  Syria  would  his  compilation  have  been 
accepted  instead  of  the  documents  themselves 
as  a  manual  to  be  publicly  read  in  church. 
Probably  at  that  time  the  individual  Gospels 
were  valued  only  as  the  Gospel  of  Mark  and  the 
non-Marcan  document  were  valued  by  those 
who  fused  them  together  in  our  first  and  third 
Gospels;  and  few  would  have  found  fault  with 
Tatian  if  he  had  re-arranged,  curtailed,  and 
otherwise  modified  his  material  on  the  same 
scale  as  these  evangelists  did  theirs.  The 
emergence  of  the  several  Gospels  and  their 
recognition  about  the  year  200,  alongside  of  the 
Old  Testament,  as  authoritative  Scriptures, 
unalterable  and  not  to  be  added  to,  was  the 
result  of  a  gradual  process ;  but  the  recognition, 
once  effected,  was  all  the  more  complete  and 
absolute  for  having  been  so  gradual.  Probably 
when  Irenaeus,  A.D.  180-200,  pleaded  that  there 
could  be  only  these  four  Gospels  because  there 
were  only  four  winds,  he  was  arguing  against 
people  who  actually  used  other  Gospels  like  that 
according  to  Peter  and  according  to  the  Egyp- 
tians, and  who  regarded  them,  too,  as  sacred 
documents.  From  the  little  we  know  of  these 
outside  Gospels  the  Church  did  well  to  exclude 
them  from  its  canon. 


Textual  Criticism  89 

But  to  canonise  a  document  is  to  expose  it  to 
many  dangers,  for  every  one  wants  to  have  it  on 
his  side.  Luckily  the  great  controversies  of 
the  Church  began  in  the  third  century  only, 
when  the  Gospel  text  was  already  too  well  fixed 
and  settled  for  partisans  to  interfere  with  it  on 
the  large  scale  on  which  Marcion  tampered  with 
Luke.  Nevertheless,  there  are  signs  that  it  was 
in  details  changed  to  suit  new  developments  of 
doctrine,  even  at  a  very  early  period;  and  in 
my  volume,  Myth,  Magic,  and  Morals,  I  have 
given  several  examples  of  such  doctrinal  altera- 
tions of  the  text.  Of  these  examples  one  was 
the  story  of  the  rich  youth  who  aspired  to 
become  a  disciple.  It  is  read  in  Matt,  xix.,  16, 
Mark  x.,  17,  Luke  xviii.,  18.  Dr.  Salmon,  of 
Dublin,  availed  himself  of  this  passage  in  order 
to  show  how  "close  is  the  connection  between 
the  criticism  of  the  Gospel  text  and  theories 
concerning  the  genesis  of  the  Gospels."1  We 
can  seldom  estimate  the  originality  and  value  of 
rival  variants  found  in  one  Gospel  without  con- 
sidering what  is  read  in  the  other  two,  supposing 
these  to  contain  parallel  versions  of  a  saying  or 
incident.  It  is,  for  example,  no  use  to  argue,  as 
did  the  Cambridge  editors,  Westcott  and  Hort 
(who  shaped  the  Revised  Version's  text),  that 
for  Matthew  the  MSS.  Aleph.  B.D.L.,  on  the 

1  George  Salmon,  Some  Criticism  of  the  Text  of  the  New 
Testament,  London,  1897,  P-  II7- 


QO  New  Testament  Criticism 

whole,  give  the  sound  and  true  tradition,  and 
that  their  reading  is,  therefore,  to  be  preferred 
in  the  passage  in  question.  The  other  two 
Gospel  texts,  especially  if  looked  at  in  the  light 
of  the  modern  theory  of  the  interrelations  of 
the  three  synoptics,  assure  us  that  those  MSS. 
here  contain  what  we  may  term  an  orthodox 
corruption. 

The  critic  I  have  just  quoted,  the  late  Dr. 
Salmon,  whose  kindness  to  myself  when  I  was 
a  youthful  scholar  I  shall  not  soon  forget, 
expresses  in  the  same  context  his  conviction  that 
the  work  of  Westcott  and  Hort  suffered  much 
from  their  want  of  interest  in  the  problem  of  the 
genesis  of  the  Gospels.  Westcott,  in  particular, 
seems  never  to  have  abandoned  the  very  inade- 
quate view  which  he  propounded  in  1860  in  his 
Introduction  to  the  Study  of  the  Gospels,  that  their 
points  of  agreement  and  disagreement  are  to  be 
explained  from  oral  tradition  alone.  There  was, 
he  argues,  a  body  of  oral  tradition  existing  and 
passing  from  teacher  to  taught  in  both  an 
Aramaic  and  a  Greek  form.  Mark  wrota 
down  the  Greek  tradition  in  its  earliest  form, 
then  Luke  wrote  it  down  in  a  developed  form, 
and  the  Greek  Matthew  wrote  down  the  later 
Hebraic  remoulding  of  the  tradition ;  but  no 
common  document  underlay  either  all  three  or 
any  two  of  them.  He  admitted  indeed  that 
"No  one  at  present  [A.D,  1860]  would  maintain 


Textual  Criticism  91 

with  some  of  the  older  scholars  of  the  Reforma- 
tion that  the  coincidences  between  the  Gospels 
are  due  simply  to  the  direct  and  independent 
action  of  the  same  Spirit  upon  the  several 
writers."  In  other  words,  the  common  ele- 
ment in  these  Gospels  was  not  the  Holy  Spirit. 
Yet  that  it  might  just  as  well  be  the  Holy  Spirit 
as  a  merely  oral  tradition  will,  I  believe,  be  plain 
to  any  one  who  reflects  how  impossible  it  is 
that  three  independent  writers  should  remember 
a  long  and  complicated  body  of  incident  and 
teaching  in  the  same  way,  and  transfer  it  to 
paper,  page  after  page,  in  almost  identical 
words. 

I  will  conclude  this  chapter  by  glancing  at 
some  famous  orthodox  corruptions,  the  history 
of  which,  as  a  lesson  in  the  psychology  of 
obstinacy,  is  hardly  less  instructive  than  the 
story  of  Dr.  Bode's  bust  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci's 
Flora. 

In  the  First  Epistle  of  John,  chap,  v.,  verse  7, 
most  but  not  all  copies  of  the  Latin  Bible,  called 
the  Vulgate,  read  as  follows: 

For  there  are  three  that  bear  ivitness  in 
heaven:  the  Father,  the  Word,  and  the  Holy 
Spirit;  and  these  three  are  one.  And  there 
are  three  that  bear  witness  on  earth:  the 
Spirit  and  the  water  and  the  blood;  and 
these  three  are  one. 

In  the  first  printed  edition  of  the  New  Testa- 


92  New  Testament  Criticism 

ment,  called  the  Complutensian,  prepared  at 
Alcala  in  Spain  in  1514  by  Cardinal  Francis 
Ximenes,  the  words  here  italicised  were  included, 
having  been  translated  from  the  Latin  text  into 
Greek;  for  the  Greek  MSS.  used  did  not  contain 
them.  They  are  only  found  in  two  Greek  MSS., 
one  of  the  fifteenth,  the  other  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury. About  400  other  Greek  codices  from  the 
fourth  century  down  to  the  fourteenth  ignore 
them.  All  MSS.  of  the  old  Latin  version  anterior 
to  Jerome  lack  them,  and  in  the  oldest  copies 
even  of  Jerome's  recension  of  the  Latin  text, 
called  the  Vulgate,  they  are  conspicuously  absent. 
The  first  Church  writer  to  cite  the  verse  in  such 
a  text  was  Priscillian,  a  Spaniard,  who  was  also 
the  first  heretic  to  be  burned  alive  by  the  Church 
in  the  year  385.  After  him  Vigilius,  Bishop  of 
Thapsus,  cites  it  about  484.  It  is  probable  that 
the  later  Latin  Fathers  mistook  what  was  only  a 
comment  of  Cyprian,  Bishop  of  Carthage  (died 
258)  for  a  citation  of  the  text.  In  any  case,  it 
filtered  from  them  into  the  Vulgate  text,1  from 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  it  was  translated  into 
Greek  and  inserted  in  two  or  three  very  late 
manuscripts. 

1  Gibbon,  in  a  note  on  chap,  xxxvii.  of  his  Decline  and 
Fall,  says  that  in  the  eleventh  and  twelfth  centuries  the 
Biblos  were  corrected  by  Lanfranc,  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, and  by  Nicolas,  Cardinal  and  librarian  of  the 
Roman  Church,  secundum  orthodoxam  fidem.  (Wetstein, 
Prolegom.,  pp.  84,  85.) 


Textual  Criticism  93 

Erasmus's  first  edition  of  the  Greek  Testa- 
ment, in  1516,  omitted  the  verse,  as  also  did  the 
second;  but  in  1522  he  issued  a  third  edition 
containing  it.  Robert  Stephens  also  inserted 
it  in  his  edition  of  1546,  which  formed  the  basis 
of  all  subsequent  editions  of  the  Greek  Testa- 
ment until  recently,  and  is  known  as  the 
Received  Text,  or  Textus  Receptus. l 

In  1670  Sandius,  an  Arian,  assailed  the  verse, 
as  also  did  Simon,  a  learned  Roman  Catholic 
priest,  in  his  Histoire  Critique  du  Nouveau  Testa- 
ment, part  i.,  chap.  18,  about  twenty  years  later. 
He  was  followed  by  Sir  Isaac  Newton,  who, 
in  a  learned  dissertation  published  after  his 
death  in  1754,  strengthened  Simon's  arguments. 
Oddly  enough,  a  Huguenot  pastor,  David  Mar- 
tin (1639-1721),  of  whom  better  things  might 
have  been  expected,  took  up  the  cudgels  in 
defence  of  the  text.  "It  were  to  be  wished,"  he 
wrote,  "that  this  strange  opinion  had  never 
quitted  the  Arians  and  Socinians;  but  we  have 
the  grief  to  see  it  pass  from  them  to  some 
Christians,  who,  though  content  to  retain 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  abandon  this  fine 
passage  where  that  holy  doctrine  is  so  clearly 
taught."  With  the  same  tolerance  of  fraud,  so 
long  as  it  makes  for  orthodoxy,  an  Anglican 
bishop  added  a  footnote  in  his  catechism  to  the 
effect  that  the  authenticity  of  this  text,  although 

1  See  Chap.  VIII. 


94  New  Testament  Criticism 

by  many  disputed,  must  be  strenuously  upheld 
because  it  is  so  valuable  a  witness  to  the  truth 
of  Trinitarian  doctrine.  Gibbon,  in  his  thirty- 
seventh  chapter,  sarcastically  wrote: 

The  memorable  text  which  asserts  the 
unity  of  the  Three  who  bear  witness  in 
Heaven  is  condemned  by  the  universal 
silence  of  the  orthodox  fathers,  ancient 
versions,  and  authentic  manuscripts.  .  .  . 
After  the  invention  of  printing,  the  editors 
of  the  Greek  Testament  yielded  to  their  own 
prejudices,  or  those  of  the  times;  and  the 
pious  fraud,  which  was  embraced  with  equal 
zeal  at  Rome  and  Geneva,  has  been  infinitely 
multiplied  in  every  country  and  every 
language  of  modern  Europe. 

This  passage  provoked  an  attack  on  Gibbon 
from  a  certain  English  Archdeacon,  Travis,  who 
rushed  into  the  arena  to  defend  the  text  which 
Kettner,  answering  Simon  nearly  a  century 
earlier,  had  extravagantly  hailed  as  "the 
most  precious  of  Biblical  pearls,  the  fairest 
flower  of  the  New  Testament,  the  compendium 
by  way  of  analogy  of  faith  in  the  Trinity."  It 
was  high  time  that  forgers  should  receive  a 
rebuke,  and  Porson,  the  greatest  of  English 
Greek  scholars  and  critics,  resolved  to  adminis- 
ter it  to  them.  In  a  series  of  Letters  to  Travis  he 
detailed  with  merciless  irony  and  infinite  learn- 
ing the  history  of  this  supposititious  text.  Travis 


Textual  Criticism  95 

answered  that  Person  was  a  Thersites,  and  that 
he  despised  his  railings.  He  accused  him  of 
defending  Gibbon,  who,  as  an  infidel,  was  no 
less  Person's  enemy  than  his  own.  Person's 
answer  reveals  the  nobility  of  his  character. 
"  Why,"  he  replies,  "  for  that  very  reason  I  would 
defend  him" — a  retort  worthy  of  Dr.  Johnson. 
Scarcely  anything  in  the  English  language  is 
so  well  worth  reading  as  these  letters  of  Porson, 
and  I  venture  to  quote  from  his  preface  a  single 
passage  about  Bengel  (died  1752),  whose  com- 
mentary on  the  New  Testament  called  the 
Gnomon  was,  for  its  day,  a  model  of  learning 
and  acumen: 

Bengel  [writes  Porson]  allowed  that  the 
verse  was  in  no  genuine  MS.,  that  the  Com- 
plutensian  editors  interpolated  it  from  the 
Latin  version,  that  the  Codex  Britannicus  is 
good  for  nothing,  that  no  ancient  Greek 
writer  cites  it  and  many  Latins  omit,  and 
that  it  was  neithei  erased  by  the  Arians  nor 
absorbed  by  the  homoeoteleuton.  Surely, 
then,  the  verse  is  spurious.  No ;  this  learned 
man  finds  out  a  way  of  escape.  The  passage 
was  of  so  sublime  and  mysterious  a  nature 
that  the  secret  discipline  of  the  Church  with- 
drew it  from  the  public  books,  till  it  was 
gradually  lost.  Under  what  a  want  of  evi- 
dence must  a  critic  labour  who  resorts  to 
such  an  argument. 

Porson  made  himself  unpopular  by  writing  these 


96  New  Testament  Criticism 

letters.  The  publisher  of  them  lost  money 
over  the  venture,  and  an  old  lady,  Mrs.  Turner, 
of  Norwich,  who  had  meant  to  leave  him  a 
fortune,  cut  down  her  bequest  to  thirty  pounds, 
because  her  clergyman  told  her  that  Person  had 
assailed  the  Christian  religion. 

The  revised  English  version  of  this  passage 
omits,  of  course,  the  fictitious  words,  and  gives 
no  hint  of  the  text  which  was  once  so  popular. 
Archdeacon  Travis  is  discreetly  forgotten  in  the 
Anglican  Church;  but  the  truth  has  far  from 
triumphed  in  the  Roman,  and  Pope  Leo  XIII., 
in  an  encyclical  of  the  year  1897,  solemnly 
decreed  that  the  fraudulent  addition  is  part  of 
authentic  scripture.  He  was  surrounded  by 
reactionaries  who  imagined  that,  if  they  could 
wrest  such  a  pronouncement  from  the  infallible 
Pontiff,  they  would  have  made  an  end  for  ever 
of  criticism  in  the  Catholic  Church.  The 
abbot  of  Monte  Casino,  the  home  of  the  Bene- 
dictines, was,  it  is  said,  on  the  point  of  publishing 
a  treatise  in  which  he  traced  this  forgery  to  its 
sources,  when  the  Pope's  decree  was  issued. 
He  thrust  back  his  treatise  into  his  pigeon-holes, 
where  it  remains.  The  aged  Pope,  however, 
who  was  a  stranger  to  such  questions,  soon 
realised  that  he  had  been  imposed  upon. 
Henceforth  he  refused  to  descend  to  particulars, 
or  to  condemn  the  many  scholars  delated  to  him 
as  modernist  heretics.  Of  these  the  Abbe  Loisy 


ALFRED  LOISY. 
97 


98  New  Testament  Criticism 

was  the  chief,  and  the  outcry  against  him  finally 
decided  Leo  to  establish  in  1902  a  commission 
for  the  progress  of  study  of  holy  scripture.  For 
the  first  time  a  few  specialists  were  called  in 
by  the  head  of  the  Catholic  Church  to  guide 
his  judgment  in  such  matters,  and  Leo  XIII. 
directed  them  to  begin  by  studying  the  question 
of  the  text,  I  John  v.,  8.  They  presently  sent 
him  their  report.  As  this  was  to  the  effect  that 
the  text  was  not  authentic,  it  was  pigeon-holed. 
But  the  aged  prelate's  mind  was  ill  at  ease;  and 
during  his  last  illness,  both  in  his  lucid  moments 
and  in  delirium,  he  could  talk  of  nothing  else.1 
He  has  been  succeeded  by  one  who  has  no 
qualms,  but  condemns  learning  wherever  and 
whenever  he  meets  with  it.  To  be  learned  in 
that  communion  is  in  our  age  to  be  suspect. 

There  is  a  similar  Trinitarian  text  in  Matthew 
xxviii.,  19,  where  the  risen  Christ  is  represented 
as  appearing  to  his  twelve  apostles  on  a  moun- 
tain top  in  Galilee  and  saying  to  them:  All 
authority  hath  been  given  unto  me  in  heaven  and  on 
earth.  Go  ye  therefore,  and  make  disciples  of  all 
the  nations,  baptising  them  into  the  name  of  the 
Father  and  of  the  Son  and  of  the  Holy  Ghost; 
teaching  them  to  observe  all  things  whatsoever  I  com- 
manded you:  and  lo,  I  am  with  you  alway,  even 
unto  the  end  of  the  world. 

1  I  derive  these  statements  from  the  Abbe  Albert  Hou  tin, 
La  Question  Biblique  au  XXe  Siecle.  Paris,  1906,  p.  94. 


Textual  Criticism  99 

Here  Eusebius,  Bishop  of  Caesarea,  who  died 
about  the  year  340,  and  was  entrusted  by  the 
Emperor  Constantine  with  the  task  of  preparing 
fifty  editions  de  luxe  of  the  gospels  for  the  great 
churches  built  or  rebuilt  after  the  Diocletian  per- 
secution was  ended,  read  in  such  of  his  works 
as  he  wrote  before  the  year  325  as  follows:  "  Go 
ye  therefore,  and  make  disciples  of  all  the  nations 
in  my  name ;  teaching  them,"  etc. 

It  is  clear,  therefore,  that  of  the  MSS.  which 
Eusebius  inherited  from  his  predecessor,  Pam- 
philus,  at  Caesarea  in  Palestine,  some  at  least 
preserved  the  original  reading,  in  which  there 
was  no  mention  either  of  Baptism  or  of  Father, 
Son,  arid  Holy  Ghost.  It  had  been  conjectured 
by  Dr.  Davidson,  Dr.  Martineau,  by  the  present 
Dean  of  Westminster,  and  by  Professor  Harnack 
(to  mention  but  a  few  names  out  of  many) ,  that 
here  the  received  text  could  not  contain  the  very 
words  of  Jesus — this  long  before  any  one  except 
Dr.  Burgon,  who  kept  the  discovery  to  himself, 
had  noticed  the  Eusebian  form  of  reading. 

It  is  satisfactory  to  notice  that  Dr.  Eberhard 
Nestle,  in  his  new  edition  of  the  New  Testament 
in  Latin  and  Greek,  furnishes  the  Eusebian 
reading  in  his  critical  apparatus,  and  that  Dr. 
Sanday  seems  to  lean  to  its  acceptance.  That 
Eusebius  found  it  in  his  MSS.  has  been  recently 
contested  by  Dr.  Chase,  the  Bishop  of  Ely,  who 
argues  that  Eusebius  found  the  Textus  Receptus 


loo  New  Testament  Criticism 

in  his  manuscripts,  but  substituted  the  shorter 
formula  in  his  works  for  fear  of  vulgarising  and 
divulging  the  sacred  Trinitarian  formula.  It  is 
interesting  to  find  a  modern  bishop  reviving  the 
very  argument  used  150  years  ago  in  support  of 
the  forged  text  in  I  John  v.,  7.  It  is  sufficient 
answer  to  point  out  that  Eusebius's  argument, 
when  he  cites  the  text,  involves  the  text  "in  my 
name."  For,  he  asks,  "In  whose  name?"  and 
answers  that  it  was  the  name  spoken  of  by  Paul 
in  his  Epistle  to  the  Philippians  ii.,  10.  It  is 
best  to  cite  the  entire  passage,  which  is  in  the 
Demonstmtio  Evangelica  (col.  240,  p.  136  of 
Migne's  edition) : 

For  he  [Jesus]  did  not  enjoin  them  to 
make  disciples  of  all  the  nations  simply  and 
without  qualification,  but  with  the  essential 
addition  "in  his  name."  For  so  great  was 
the  virtue  attaching  to  his  appellation  that 
the  Apostle  says  (Phil.ii.,  10)  "God  bestowed 
on  him  the  name  above  every  name :  that  in 
the  name  of  Jesus  every  knee  shall  bow,  of 
things  in  heaven  and  earth  and  under  the 
earth."  It  was  right,  therefore,  that  he 
should  lay  stress  on  the  virtue  of  the  power 
residing  in  his  name,  but  hidden  from  the 
many,  and  therefore  say  to  his  apostles, 
"Go  ye  and  make  disciples  of  all  the  nations 
in  my  name." 

Surely  Dr.  Chase  would  not  argue  that  the 
name  implied  in  Phil,  ii.,  10,  was  the  name  of 


Textual  Criticism  101 

Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Spirit.  That  rcouid  be  a 
pretty  heresy  for  an  Anglican  bishop  to  enter- 
tain. Would  he  attribute  a  heresy  at  once  so 
violent  and  senseless  to  Eusebius?  Where, 
then,  is  the  point  of  arguing  that  Eusebius,  in 
the  score  of  passages  where  he  cites  Matt,  xxviii., 
19,  in  the  above  form,  was  moved  by  the  dis- 
cipline, arcani,  or  fear  of  divulging  Christian 
mysteries,  from  writing  the  formula  out — the 
more  so  as  it  was  on  the  lips  of  many  of  his 
contemporaries  and  had  been  published  long 
before  by  Dionysius  of  Alexandria,  Cyprian% 
Tertullian,  and  perhaps  by  Irenaeus  and  Origen? 
Why  did  they,  too,  not  hide  the  sacred  formula? 
Moreover,  why  should  Eusebius  drop  out  the 
command  to  baptise?  Surely  the  discipline, 
arcani  does  not  explain  his  omission  of  that? 

In  the  case  just  examined  it  is  to  be  noticed 
that  not  a  single  MS.  or  ancient  version  has 
preserved  to  us  the  true  reading.  But  that  is 
not  surprising,  for,  as  Dr.  C.  R.  Gregory,  one 
of  the  greatest  of  our  textual  critics,  reminds 
us,  "The  Greek  MSS.  of  the  text  of  the  New 
Testament  were  often  altered  by  scribes,  who 
put  into  them  the  readings  which  were  familiar 
to  them,  and  which  they  held  to  be  the  right 
readings."1 

These  facts  speak  for  themselves.     Our  Greek 

1  Canon  and  Text  of  the  New  Testament,  T.  and  T.  Clark, 
1907,  p.  424. 


102  New  Testament  Criticism 

texts,  not*cftily  of  tho'G6spels,  but  of  the  Epistles 
as  well,  have  been  revised  and  interpolated  by 
orthodox  copyists.  We  can  trace  their  perver- 
sions of  the  text  in  a  few  cases,  with  the  aid  of 
patristic  citations  and  ancient  versions.  But 
there  must  remain  many  passages  which  have 
been  so  corrected,  but  where  we  cannot  to-day 
expose  the  fraud.  It  was  necessary  to  empha- 
sise this  point  because  Drs.  Westcott  and  Hort 
used  to  aver  that  there  is  no  evidence  of  merely 
doctrinal  changes  having  been  made  in  the  text 
of  the  New  Testament.  This  is  just  the  opposite 
of  the  truth,  and  such  distinguished  scholars 
as  Alfred  Loisy,  J.  Wellhausen,  Eberhard  Nestle, 
Adolf  Harnack,  to  mention  only  four  names,  do 
not  scruple  to  recognise  the  fact.  Here  is  a  line 
of  research  which  is  only  beginning  to  be  worked. 


CHAPTER  VI 
SOME  PIONEERS 

DROINDE  liber  esse  volo,  "  Henceforth  I  mean 
to  be  free, "  wrote  Luther  when  he  broke 
with  the  Pope;  and  he  had  the  merit  at  least  of 
throwing  off  authority  and  asserting  the  right 
and  duty  of  the  individual  believer  to  read  the 
Bible  for  himself  and  interpret  it  without  the 
help  of  a  priest.  "With  all  due  respect  for  the 
Fathers,"  he  said,  "I  prefer  the  authority  of 
Scripture"  (Salvis  reverentiis  Patrum  ego  prcefero 
auctoritatem  Scripturcz)  .*  In  making  such  pro- 
nouncements Luther  builded  better  than  he 
knew,  and  if  we  would  realise  how  much  we  owe 
to  him  for  the  bold  challenge  he  hurled  at  Papal 
authority,  we  have  only  to  compare  the  treatment 
by  the  Pope  Pius  X.  of  the  Modernists,  whose 
chief  offence  is  desire  to  understand  the  Bible, 
with  the  respect  paid  in  the  Lutheran  Church 
to  such  men  as  Harnack,  Von  Soden,  Preuschen, 
Violet,  and  in  the  Anglican  to  such  scholars  as 

1  See  Farrar's  History  of  Interpretation,  p.  327. 
103 


IO4  New  Testament  Criticism 

Robertson  Smith,  Professor  Driver,  Professor 
Sanday,  Professor  Burkitt.  All  these  men  would, 
in  the  Roman  Church  of  the  last  ten  years, 
have  had  to  suppress  or  swallow  their  opinions, 
or  would  have  been  hounded  out  of  the  Church 
with  writs  of  excommunication  amid  the  im- 
precations of  the  orthodox  crowd. 

One  of  the  earliest  German  scholars  that 
attempted  to  understand  the  Gospels  and  divest 
the  figure  of  Jesus  of  the  suit  of  stiff  dogmatic 
buckram  with  which  theologians  had  immemo- 
rially  bound  him  was  the  poet  and  philosopher, 
Johann  Gottfried  Herder,  who  made  his  literary 
debut  in  1773  in  a  volume  of  essays,  to  which 
Goethe  also  contributed.  He  was  a  humanist, 
a  student  of  the  classics,  and  an  enthusiastic 
reader  of  Shakespeare.  It  was  the  age  of 
Frederick  the  Great  and  Voltaire,  an  age  when 
in  north  Germany  men  were  able  to  think  and 
write  freely.  In  his  first  essay  in  theological 
criticism,  entitled  Letters  on  the  Study  of  Theo- 
logy, he  urged  that  the  Bible  must  be  read  from 
a  human  point  of  view,  and  intuitively  discerned 
the  impossibility  of  harmonising  the  fourth 
Gospel  with  the  Synoptics.  Orthodox  divines, 
like  the  late  Dr.  Hort,  a  hundred  years  later 
among  ourselves  were  still  pretending  that  this 
Gospel  supplements,  but  not  contradicts,  the 
other  three.  You  may  write  a  life  of  Jesus, 
argued  Herder,  out  of  John,  or  out  of  the  Synop- 


LUTHER. 
i    105 


io6          New  Testament   Criticism 

tics,  but  not  out  of  both  sources  at  once,  for 
they  are  irreconcilable  with  each  other.  John 
he  declared  to  have  been  written  from  the  stand- 
point of  Greek  ideas,  as  a  corrective  to  the 
Palestinian  Gospel  which  the  other  three  reflect. 
They  represent  Jesus  as  a  Jewish  Messiah,  John 
as  Saviour  of  the  world;  and  the  latter  drops 
out  of  sight  the  demonology  of  the  other  three 
because  its  author,  like  Philo,  regarded  it  all  as 
so  much  Palestinian  superstition. 

Yet  Herder  did  not  reject  miracles.  He  even 
accepted  that  of  the  raising  of  Lazarus  from  the 
dead,  and  argued  that  the  earlier  gospels  passed 
it  over  in  silence  in  order  not  to  excite  the  wrath 
of  the  Jews  against  the  humble  family  in 
Bethany!  This  argument  is  not  too  absurd 
for  Dean  Farrar  to  repeat  it  a  hundred  years 
later  in  his  Life  of  Christ  (p.  511).  The  first 
evangelists  would  not  record  "a  miracle  which 
would  have  brought  into  dangerous  prominence 
a  man  who  was  still  living.  .  .  .  Even  if  this 
danger  had  ceased,  it  would  have  been  obviously 
repulsive  to  the  quiet  family  of  Bethany  to  have 
been  made  the  focus  of  an  intense  and  irreverent 
curiosity, "  etc.  With  regard  to  the  inter- 
relations of  the  Synoptics,  Herder  showed  more 
acumen,  and  anticipated  the  latest  critical 
positions.  Mark,  he  wrote,  is  no  abridgment, 
but  a  true  and  self-contained  Gospel;  and  if 
Matthew  and  Luke  contain  other  and  more 


JOHANN  GOTTFRIED  HERDER. 
107 


io8  New  Testament   Criticism 

matter,  that  is  because  they  added  it,  and  not 
because  Mark,  having  it  before  him,  left  it  out. 
Mark  is  the  unadorned  central  column  on 
which  the  other  two  lean — shorter  than  they, 
but  more  original.  They  added  the  Birth 
Stories  because  a  new  want  of  such  information 
had,  later  than  Mark,  grown  up  among  believers. 
And  Mark  indulges  in  less  invective  than  they 
against  the  Jews,  because  the  new  religion  was 
still  largely  a  Jewish  business.  That  neither 
the  first  three  Gospels  nor  the  fourth  were  in- 
tended to  be  read  as  sober  historical  treatises 
was  also  clear  to  Herder.  The  former  were 
aimed  to  exalt  him  as  a  Messiah  who  fulfilled 
the  Jewish  prophecies;  the  fourth  is  an  epic  of 
the  Logos. 

But  Herder's  appreciations  of  the  Life  of 
Jesus  were  after  all  less  scientific  and  earlier  in 
type  than  those  of  Hermann  Samuel  Reimarus, 
of  whose  epoch-making  contribution  to  the 
cause  of  New  Testament  criticism  Albert 
Schweitzer  has  recently,  in  his  work,  Von 
Reimarus  zu  Wrede,1  reminded  those  who  had 
forgotten  the  great  theological  controversies  of 
Lessing  and  Strauss.  Reimarus,  born  in  1694, 

1  From  R.  to  W.,  Tubingen,  1906,  lately  issued  in  an 
English  translation  under  the  title  The  Quest  of  the  His- 
torical Jesus.  On  Reimarus  and  Lessing  see  also  Scherer's 
History  of  German  Literature,  translated  by  Mrs.  F.  C. 
Conybeare,  1886,  vol.  ii.,  p.  72  ff. 


Some  Pioneers  109 

was  for  forty-one  years  Professor  of  Philosophy 
in  Hamburg,  and  died  in  1768.  He  was  the 
son-in-law  of  the  famous  philologist,  J.  Alb. 
Fabricius,  and  was  himself  a  man  of  high  classical 
attainments.  He  thus  brought  to  the  study 
of  the  New  Testament  a  trained  judgment, 
unspoiled  by  the  narrow  calling  of  the  profes- 
sional divine.  His  treatises  on  early  Christian- 
ity were  probably  the  more  untrammelled  by 
orthodox  prejudices  because  they  were  not 
intended  by  him  for  publication,  and  they  would 
never  have  seen  the  light  had  they  not  fallen 
into  the  hands  of  Lessing,  who  published  in  the 
years  1774-8  the  more  important  of  them  under 
the  title  of  Fragments  of  an  Anonymous  Wolf  en- 
butteler.  The  German  world  had  seemed  to  be 
in  a  mood  for  liberal  criticism,  and  historians 
and  humanists  there,  as  in  England,  were  already 
turning  their  attention  to  dogmatic  religion; 
nevertheless,  the  Fragments  fell  like  bombshells 
in  the  circles  of  the  pious,  and  precipitated  a 
real  crisis  in  the  history  of  the  Protestant  Church. 
The  Christ  of  dogma  was  now  arraigned  as 
never  before,  and  has,  so  to  speak,  been  on  trial 
ever  since  at  the  bar  of  History.  For  the 
fanciful  figure  of  orthodox  theologians  the  real 
historical  Jewish  Messiah  began  to  emerge. 

The  message  or  Gospel  of  Jesus  was,  accord- 
ing to  Reimarus,  summed  up  in  the  appeal  to 
his  countrymen  to  repent,  because  the  Kingdom 


no          New  Testament  Criticism 

of  Heaven  was  at  hand.  But  of  the  Kingdom  he, 
equally  with  John  the  Baptist,  conceived  in  the 
current  Jewish  manner;  and  if  he  transcended 
his  contemporaries  in  his  forecast  thereof,  it 
was  only  in  so  far  as  he  taught  that  observance 
of  the  Law  of  Moses  would  develop  therein  unto 
a  higher  and  deeper  righteousness,  less  bound  up 
with  sacrificial  cult,  false  Sabbatarianism,  and 
ritual  purity  of  meats.  He  never  broke  with 
the  law  nor  dreamed  of  doing  so.  It  was  only 
when  they  were  persecuted  and  driven  out  of 
the  synagogue  that  his  disciples  broke  with  it—- 
not of  choice,  but  of  necessity. 

Thus  the  creed  of  the  earliest  Church  con- 
sisted of  the  single  clause:  "I  believe  that  Jesus 
shall  shortly  inaugurate  the  Kingdom  of  God  on 
earth. "  No  wonder  that  the  faith  spread 
rapidly.  Multitudes  were  already  filled  with  a 
belief  in  the  imminence  of  the  promised  King- 
dom, and  were  but  too  ready  to  acclaim  Jesus 
as  God's  prophet  and  instrument  in  bringing  it 
about.  This  was  the  whole  of  the  message  that 
his  apostles  had  to  carry  to  the  cities  of  Israel, 
avoiding  those  of  the  Samaritans  and  Gentiles. 
The  Jews  of  Palestine  were  groaning  under  the 
Roman  yoke,  and  were  prepared  to  welcome  a 
redeemer.  For  them  a  Messiah  was  Son  of  God ; 
all  the  successors  of  David  and  kings  of  the 
people  of  the  Covenant  were  sons  of  God,  but 
the  Messiah  was  such  in  a  special  sense.  The 


Some  Pioneers  ill 

Messianic  claims  of  Jesus  did  not  lift  him  above 
humanity,  and  there  was  nothing  metaphysical 
about  the  role. 

The  Gospel  parables  teach  us  little  of  what 
the  Kingdom  was  to  be.  They  all  assume  that 
we  know  it.  If  we  desire  to  learn  more  about  it, 
we  must  go  to  the  writings  of  the  Jews.  In  any 
case  the  first  condition  of  our  understanding 
who  and  what  Jesus  was  is  that  we  should  turn 
our  backs  on  the  catechism  notions  of  a  meta- 
physical sonship  of  God,  of  the  Trinity,  on 
orthodox  dogmas  in  general,  and  should  study 
instead  current  Jewish  ideas.  With  these  a  priori 
notions  will  vanish  the  mistaken  supposition 
that  Jesus  meant  to  found  a  new  religion.  He 
never  dreamed  of  abolishing  the  Jewish  religion 
and  of  substituting  a  new  system  in  its  place. 
His  chief  disciple,  Peter,  long  after  the  resur- 
rection, needed  the  vision  at  Joppa  to  assure  him 
that  he  might  without  sin  eat  with  men  uncir- 
cumcised,  and  the  disciples  who  fled  from  Jeru- 
salem after  Stephen's  martyrdom  "spoke  the 
word  to  none  save  only  to  Jews."  It  follows 
that  the  text  Matthew  xxviii.,  19  is  impossible, 
not  only  because  it  is  spoken  by  one  risen  from 
the  dead,  but  because  its  tenor  is  universalist 
and  it  presupposes  the  Trinity  and  the  meta- 
.  physical  sonship  of  Jesus.  It  also  conflicts 
with  our  earliest  tradition  of  baptism  in  the 
community  of  Christians,  for,  as  we  learn  both 


112          New  Testament  Criticism 

from  the  Book  of  Acts  and  from  Paul,  they 
baptised  at  first,  not  into  the  name  of  the  three 
Persons,  but  into  that  of  Jesus  the  Messiah  or 
Christ.  Neither  baptism  nor  in  its  later  forms 
the  Eucharist  derives  from  Jesus. 

That  Jesus  worked  cures  which  the  people 
round  him  regarded  as  signs  and  wonders  cannot 
be  disputed.  When  Reimarus  further  opines 
that  Jesus  bade  those  he  healed  to  tell  no  man 
of  it  by  way  of  exciting  the  curiosity  of  the 
crowd,  we  cannot  follow  him.  But  all  will  admit 
that  some  of  his  greater  miracles  were  invented 
by  propagandists  who  felt  a  call  to  prove  that 
in  works  of  power  the  Messiah  transcended  the 
worthies  of  the  Old  Testament.  If  it  be  true 
that  in  Jerusalem  the  multitude  were  as  con- 
vinced as  the  texts  assure  us  they  were  of  his 
immediately  manifesting  the  Kingdom  of  God 
to  them,  then  by  a  single  miracle  publicly  worked 
on  a  feast-day  he  must  have  carried  all  before 
him.  Twice  he  seems  to  have  made  sure  that 
his  vision  of  the  Kingdom  was  about  to  be 
made  a  reality:  once  when,  sending  forth 
his  disciples,  in  Matt.  x.  23,  he  coupled  their 
mission  with  the  assurance  that  they  would  not 
have  time  to  visit  all  the  cities  of  Israel  before 
the  Son  of  Man  came — that  is,  that  the  masses 
flocking  to  him  would  erewhile  have  witnessed 
the  Messiah's  advent;  and  a  second  time  when, 
in  the  style  of  Messiah,  he  entered  Jerusalem 


Some  Pioneers  113 

riding  on  an  ass  amid  the  acclamations  of  the 
multitude.  But  the  people  hung  back  after  all, 
and  his  feat  of  clearing  the  temple  of  its  Pascha- 
tide  traffic  fell  flat,  as  also  did  his  denunciations 
of  priests  and  pharisees.  The  Galileans  had 
forsaken  him,  and  now  the  ere  while  enthusiastic 
people  of  Jerusalem  forsook  him  in  the  same  way. 
He  had  begun  by  concealing  his  quality  of 
Messiah  of  set  purpose;  he  ended  by  concealing 
it  from  fear  and  necessity.  He  felt  that  his  star 
had  set  and  his  mission  was  a  failure  when  from 
the  cross  he  uttered  the  bitter  cry  of  disillusion- 
ment: "My  God,  my  God,  why  hast  thou 
forsaken  me?"  He  had  never  contemplated 
suffering  thus,  never  looked  forward  to  a  death 
on  the  cross.  With  God's  miraculous  aid  he  had 
expected  to  establish  a  kingdom  on  earth  in 
which  the  Jews,  rescued  from  the  yoke  of  infidel 
and  Gentile  oppressors,  would  live  happily  ever 
afterwards;  and  now  his  countrymen  betrayed 
and  forsook  him,  and  the  Roman  was  slaying 
him  with  every  circumstance  of  cruelty  and 
mockery. 

Reimarus  shows  less  insight  in  his  account  of 
the  events  which  followed  the  death  of  Jesus. 
He  is  right,  no  doubt,  in  arguing  that  the  dis- 
ciples, driven  out  of  their  old  enthusiasms  by 
the  logic  of  facts,  took  refuge  in  Daniel's  vision 
of  an  apocalyptic  Son  of  Man,  borne  in  glory 
on  the  clouds  of  heaven  to  earth.  But  when  he 


H4          New  Testament   Criticism 

gives  credit  to  the  story  that  the  apostles  stole 
the  body  of  Jesus  in  order  to  accredit  their  story 
of  his  resurrection  he  betrays  a  certain  want  of 
grip.  It  was  this  feature  of  his  reconstruction 
which  more  than  any  other  roused  against  Les- 
sing  the  accusation  of  impiety  from  those  who 
for  hundreds  of  years  had  complacently  accepted 
Jerome's  view  that  Peter  and  Paul  had  only 
got  up  their  quarrel  at  Antioch  for  the  gallery, 
and  had  never  really  been  at  issue  with  one 
another — a  view  that  shocked  even  Augustine.1 
Reimarus  awoke  many  out  of  the  torpor  of 
assurance.  Particular  features  of  his  system 
were  no  doubt  erroneous,  but  in  the  main  his 
arguments  were  irrefragable,  because  he  inter- 
preted his  documents  in  their  plain  and  literal, 
but  to  the  orthodox  disconcerting,  sense.  Mod- 
ern criticism,  even  in  Anglican  and  Roman 
circles,  is  slowly  coming  round  to  his  chief 
conclusions,  which  were  that  Jesus  never  meant 
to  found  a  new  religion,  but  only  to  herald  that 
Kingdom  of  God  towards  which  the  aspirations 
of  pious  Jews  had  for  generations  been  directed, 
and  that  the  fourth  Gospel  must  simply  be  set 

1  See  Jerome's  89 th  Epistle  to  Augustine,  where  he 
adheres  to  his  view  that  Paul  and  Peter  were  both  acting 
a  part,  and  that  they  merely  got  up  their  tiff  in  order  to 
reassure  the  Judaisers.  Jerome  argues  that  Paul  was 
guilty  of  similar  dissimulation  when  he  took  Timothy,  a 
Gentile,  and  circumcised  him  for  fear  of  the  Jews. 


Some  Pioneers  115 

aside  by  those  who  would  discover  the  true  Jesus. 
His  account  of  Jesus'  attitude  towards  the  law, 
and  of  the  gradual  abandonment  after  his  death 
of  that  attitude  by  his  disciples,  anticipated  the 
best  criticism  of  our  own  generation.  When 
writers  like  Dean  Farrar  dilate  on  the  "crude 
negations"  and  "dreary  illuminism"  of  Reima- 
rus,1  they  only  betray  their  elementary  igno- 
rance of  the  problems  they  profess  to  solve. 

About  the  same  time  as  Reimarus  was  writ- 
ing, a  striking  book  appeared  in  England.  This 
was  E.  Evanson's  work  on  The  Dissonance  of 
the  Four  Generally  Received  Evangelists  and  the 
Evidence  of  their  Respective  Authenticity  Exam- 
ined. The  author  was  born  at  Warrington,  in 
Lancashire,  in  1731,  and  received  a  classical 
education,  first  from  his  uncle,  Mr.  John  Evan- 
son,  rector  of  Mitcham,  in  Surrey,  and  then  at 
Emanuel,  Cambridge.  He  graduated  M.A.  in 
1753,  took  orders,  and  became  his  uncle's  curate. 
But  he  was  soon  convinced  that  the  prayer- 
book  was  opposed  to  Scripture,  and  accordingly 
omitted  some  phrases  of  it  and  changed  others 
in  public  service.  Having  also  maintained  that 
Paul  denied  the  physical  as  opposed  to  spiritual 
resurrection,  he  incurred  a  prosecution  for  heresy. 
The  Solicit  or- General,  Mr.  Wedderburn,  de- 
fended him  gratis  on  this  occasion,  and,  having 

1  See  Farrar 's  History  of  Interpretation,  p.  400. 


n6          New  Testament  Criticism 

secured  his  acquittal,  procured  him  Church 
preferment,  not  aware  that  Evanson  had  made 
up  his  mind  to  quit  the  Church. 

It  was  supposed  in  1772  that  the  Archbishop 
of  Canterbury,  with  the  help  of  certain  of  his 
colleagues,  was  preparing  a  revision  of  the 
Anglican  liturgy  and  articles,  so  Evanson  was 
encouraged  to  lay  his  scruples  before  him  in  a 
letter,  in  which  he  begged  him  to  persevere, 
to  remove  difficulties,  and  ease  the  tender 
consciences  of  many  learned  clergymen.  His 
extremely  reasonable  application  was  never 
answered,  any  more  than  has  been  the  memor- 
andum of  nearly  2000  incumbents  who  recently 
approached  the  bishops  in  a  similar  spirit  and 
with  a  like  object.  Mr.  Evanson  next  published 
a  letter  to  Hurd,  Bishop  of  Lichfield,  setting 
forth  the  grounds  and  reasons  of  his  dissatis- 
faction, and  shortly  after  left  the  Church, 
resigning  his  living.  Hurd,  in  answer,  expressed 
more  regret  than  surprise,  but  praised  him 
warmly  for  following  his  convictions.  He  only 
lamented  the  loss  to  the  Church  of  one  so  full 
of  liberal  spirit  and  erudition.  The  Bishop  of 
Rochester  also  expressed  his  concern  that  a 
clergyman  of  Mr.  Evanson's  abilities  should 
resign  his  preferment  for  no  other  reasons  than 
those  he  had  assigned  to  the  Bishop  of  Lichfield. 
Subsequently  Evanson  received  a  pension  from 
the  family  of  the  Earl  of  Bute.  "An  open 


Some  Pioneers  117 

declaration  of  his  faith,  which  duty  called  for 
and  sincerity  enjoined,  provoked  the  rancour 
and  malice  of  bigots  and  brought  on  him  their 
hatred  and  persecution."1  And  certainly  Mr. 
Evanson,  at  the  outset  of  his  work  on  the  dis- 
sonances of  the  evangelists,  strikes  no  uncertain 
note,  for  he  begins  as  follows: 

After  so  many  writers,  some  of  them  of 
great  erudition  and  distinguished  abilities, 
in  almost  all  ages  of  what  is  called  the 
Christian  Church,  have  undertaken  to  har- 
monise and  show  the  perfect  agreement  of  the 
four  generally  received  Evangelists,  and  to 
reconcile  all  the  recurring  differences  in  both 
the  facts  and  order  of  their  several  narrations, 
it  will  undoubtedly  appear  the  highest  degree 
of  presumptuous  arrogance  to  attempt  now 
at  last  to  demonstrate  that  so  much  learned 
and  ingenious  labour  hath  been  bestowed  in 
vain. 

Evanson  gives  examples  of  such  dissonance 
both  between  one  gospel  and  another,  and  be- 
tween separate  parts  of  the  same  gospel;  but 
he  made  the  mistake  of  overestimating  the 
trustworthiness  of  Luke.  This  he  was  led  to 
do  because  he  was  imposed  on,  firstly  by  the 
parade  of  historical  method  and  research  in 

1  From  Some  Account  of  His  Life  and  Religious  Opinions, 
written  by  a  friend  on  the  occasion  of  Evanson 's  death  in 
1805. 


n8          New  Testament  Criticism 

Luke's  exordium,  and  secondly  by  Luke's  ex- 
cellence as  a  stylist.  The  latter  quality  par- 
ticularly appealed  to  so  refined  a  scholar. 
To  illustrate  this  point  I  venture  to  cite  his 
remarks  about  the  passage,  Matthew  viii.  5-16  = 
Luke  vii.  i-io,  in  which  the  healing  of  the 
Centurion's  child  is  related.  He  notes  that  in 
Matthew  the  Centurion  himself  goes  to  Jesus, 
whereas  in  Luke  he  only  sent  a  deputation  of 
elders  of  the  Jews,  and  declared  that  he  did  not 
esteem  himself  worthy  to  go  in  person.  "Here, 
again, "  comments  Evanson, 

one  of  these  historians  related  a  falsehood. 
It  is  observable  also  that,  according  to  this 
gospel  called  St.  Matthew's,  this  miracle, 
in  order  of  time,  preceded  the  healing  of 
Peter's  mother-in-law,  the  calling  of  Mat- 
thew himself,  and  the  choice  of  the  twelve 
apostles;  whereas  St.  Luke  tells  us  that  it 
was  subsequent  to  all  three.  Yet  St.  Luke 
assures  Theophilus  that,  having  attained 
perfect  information  of  everything  from  the 
very  first,  he  had  written  an  account  of  every 
transaction  in  order.  Now,  he  could  have 
received  his  information  only  from  the 
Apostles  he  lived  with  at  Jerusalem,  of  whom 
Matthew  was  one ;  and  as  it  is  impossible  but 
Matthew  must  have  known  whether  he  was 
himself  with  Jesus  when  this  miracle  was 
wrought  or  not,  he  could  not  have  written 
that  he  was  not  and  have  informed  St.  Luke 
that  he  was;  and,  therefore,  the  writer  of  this 


Some  Pioneers  119 

gospel  could  not  be  St.  Matthew  nor  any 
other  of  the  Apostles.  To  avoid  unnecessary 
repetitions,  the  reader  is  desired  to  consider 
this  as  a  general  remark  upon  the  many 
instances  of  contradiction,  in  the  order  of  the 
narration,  between  this  writer  and  St.  Luke, 
which  are  both  numerous  and  obvious  to  the 
least  degree  of  attention. 

Evanson  also  was  shrewd  enough  to  see  that 
the  legend  of  the  miraculous  birth  of  Jesus  was 
no  part  of  the  primitive  gospel  tradition.  He 
argues  that  the  first  two  chapters  of  Luke  are 
an  interpolation ;  but  he  was  well  aware  of  the 
similarity  of  vocabulary  and  idiom  which  con- 
nects them  with  the  rest  of  the  gospel,  and  met 
this  obstacle  to  his  argument  by  supposing  that 
the  interpolator  imitated  Luke.  He  could  not 
believe  that  the  same  hand  which  penned  these 
two  chapters  could  have  narrated  the  incident 
of  John  sending  his  disciples  to  Jesus  to  ascer- 
tain if  he  was  the  Messiah.  He  writes  thus: 

Now,  it  seems  absolutely  impossible  that 
John,  after  being  from  his  earliest  infancy 
personally  acquainted  with  Jesus,  and  not 
only  in  possession  of  all  the  information 
respecting  him,  which  he  must  have  learned 
from  the  two  families,  but  so  miraculously 
impressed  with  affection  and  reverence  for 
him  as  to  exult  with  joy,  though  but  an 
embryo  in  the  womb,  at  the  mere  sound  of  his 
mother's  voice,  could  at  any  time  have 


I2O          New  Testament  Criticism 

entertained  the  least  doubt  of  Jesus  being 
the  Messiah  (p.  37). 

The  true  view,  of  course,  is  that  Luke,  in  spite 
of  his  pretensions  to  accuracy,  was  a  careless 
and  credulous  writer. 

Evanson's  appreciations  of  the  legend  of  the 
miraculous  birth  are  couched  in  a  very  modern 
spirit.  He  notes  that,  according  to  Paul's 
preaching  at  Antioch,  it  was  the  resurrection  and 
no  birth  miracle  that  constituted  Jesus  the  Son 
of  God;  and  also  that  Luke,  except  in  his  first 
two  chapters,  nowhere  calls  Jesus  the  Son  of  God 
until  after  the  Resurrection.  Before  that  event 
he  terms  him  Son  of  Man  or  Son  of  David.  On 
p.  44  he  speaks  of  "this  pagan  fable  of  the 
miraculous  conception  of  Jesus  Christ";  and  just 
below  he  writes  on  p.  49  as  follows: 

In  no  one  apostolic  Epistle,  in  no  one  dis- 
course recorded  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles, 
is  the  miraculous  conception,  or  any  circum- 
stance of  the  history  of  Jesus  previous  to 
John's  baptism,  hinted  at  even  in  the  most 
distant  manner — on  the  contrary,  that 
baptism  is  repeatedly  referred  to  and  men- 
tioned as  the  proper  commencement  of 
evangelical  instruction ;  and  when  the  eleven 
Apostles  proceeded  to  elect  a  twelfth,  to 
supply  the  place  of  Judas,  the  only  qualifi- 
cation made  essentially  requisite  in  the  can- 
didates was  their  having  been  eye-witnesses 
pf  our  Lord's  ministry  from  the  baptism  of 


Some  Pioneers  121 

John  to  his  Ascension.  These  two  chapters 
of  Luke  are  the  daring  fiction  of  some  of 
the  easy-working  interpolators  (pacioupyot),  as 
Origen  calls  them,  of  the  beginning  of  the 
second  century,  from  among  the  pagan 
converts,  who,  to  do  honour  as  they  deemed 
it  to  the  author  of  their  newly-embraced 
religion,  were  willing  that  his  birth  should, 
at  least,  equal  that  of  the  pagan  heroes  and 
demigods,  Bacchus  and  Hercules,  in  its 
wonderful  circumstances  and  high  descent; 
and  thereby  laid  the  foundation  of  the  suc- 
ceeding orthodox  deification  of  the  man 
Jesus,  which,  in  degree  of  blasphemous  ab- 
surdity, exceeds  even  the  gross  fables  of 
pagan  superstition. 

And  in  another  place  (p.  14)  he  remarks  on 
the  fact  that  Justin  Martyr,  in  his  Apology, 

illustrates  and  pleads  for  the  toleration  of  the 
orthodox  doctrine  of  the  generation  of  the 
Word  by  the  heathen  Emperors,  because 
of  its  resemblance  to  the  fabulous  origin  of 
their  own  deities  Mercury  and  Minerva ;  and 
justifies  the  doctrine  of  the  incarnation  by 
its  similarity  to  the  births  of  ^sculapius 
and  Hercules,  and  the  other  illustrious  god- 
men  of  pagan  mythology. 

In  these  and  many  other  passages  Evanson 
belonged  rather  to  the  late  nineteenth  century 
than  to  the  eighteenth.  No  one  in  his  day 
realised  so  clearly  as  he  the  low  standard,  or  no 
standard,  of  literary  authenticity  which  charac- 


122  New  Testament  Criticism 

terised  early  Christianity.  Thus  he  notes  that 
in  the  earliest  age  it  was  so  common  among  the 
Christians  "to  produce  entire  pieces  of  their 
own  or  others'  forgery  under  the  name  of  any 
writer  they  pleased  that,  if  what  we  call  the 
scriptures  of  the  New  Testament  were  not  so 
tampered  with,  they  are  almost  the  only  writings, 
upon  the  same  subject,  of  those  early  times  which 
have  escaped  free. " 

It  is  a  matter  of  common  observation  that, 
in  proportion  as  men  overtop  their  contempo- 
raries in  one  particular,  they  often  lag  behind 
them  in  another;  and  a  critic  may  see  with  one 
eye  and  be  blind  of  its  fellow.  It  was  so  with 
Evanson,  who  fell  into  the  extraordinary  error 
of  attaching  to  so-called  prophecies  of  Christ  an 
importance  which  he  denied  to  miracles.  "Pro- 
phecy," he  wrote,  "is  not  only  the  most  satis- 
factory, but  also  the  most  lasting,  supernatural 
evidence  of  the  truth  of  any  revelation."  And 
he  even  went  the  length  of  predicting  from  the 
Apocalypse  the  end  of  the  world  within  a  few 
generations.  Just  in  proportion  as  he  saw 
clearly  how  insufficient  is  the  evidence  of  the 
gospels  to  bear  the  strain  of  the  vast  super- 
structures that  theologians  have  built  upon  them, 
his  mind  seems  to  have  been  fuddled  by  the 
study  of  this  book.  We  have  already  seen  that 
Woolston  was  infected  with  the  same  craze ;  and 
the  great  Isaac  Newton  himself,  in  the  prime  of 


Some  Pioneers  123 

his  life,  gave  up  what  time  he  could  spare  from 
his  amazing  mathematical  and  astronomical 
investigations  to  what,  to  a  modern  mind,  are 
the  silliest  lucubrations  about  the  vaticinations 
of  the  book  of  Daniel  and  of  the  Apocalypse. 
In  Joseph  Priestley,  born  near  Leeds  in  1733, 
we  have  another  example  of  a  great  man  of 
science  who  was  also  a  bold  innovator  in  the 
domain  of  Church  history.  In  early  youth,  he 
tells  us,  he  "came  to  embrace  what  is  generally 
called  the  heterodox  side  of  every  question." 
A  History  of  the  Corruptions  of  Christianity, 
published  in  1782,  and  a  History  of  Early 
Opinions  Concerning  Jesus  Christ,  printed  in 
1786,  involved  him  in  a  long  and  keen  contro- 
versy with  an  orthodox  divine,  Dr.  Horsley. 
This  divine  was  rewarded  with  a  fat  bishopric 
for  detecting  a  few  errors  of  scholarship  in 
Priestley's  works,  while  the  latter  a  few  years 
later,  in  1791,  was  rewarded  by  having  his  house 
in  Birmingham  wrecked  and  set  on  fire  by  the 
Tory  mob.  The  chemical  instruments,  by  use 
of  which  he  had  carried  on  his  epoch-making 
researches  into  the  composition  of  gases  and 
made  his  discovery  of  oxygen,  were  destroyed, 
his  manuscripts  torn  to  bits,  and  his  books 
scattered  for  half-a-mile  along  the  roadside. 
Priestley  and  his  family  barely  escaped  with 
their  lives.  His  main  heresy  was  the  entirely 
correct  opinion  that  the  earliest  Christians 


124          New  Testament   Criticism 

neither  knew  anything  of  Trinitarian  doctrine 
nor  deified  Jesus  after  the  manner  of  Athanasian 
doctrine.  He  denied  that  the  Apostles  could 
have  discerned  God  Almighty  in  the  man  of 
flesh  and  blood  with  whom  they  familiarly  con- 
sorted. "I  am  really  astonished,"  he  wrote  to 
Horsley,  "how  you  can  really  entertain  the  idea 
of  any  number  of  persons  being  on  this  even 
footing,  as  you  call  it,  with  a  being  whom  they 
actually  believed  to  be  maker  of  themselves 
and  all  things,  even  the  Eternal  God  himself."1 
But  Priestley  did  not  question  the  authenticity 
of  the  writings  of  the  New  Testament  anymore 
than  his  master  Socinus,  and,  like  other  Unita- 
rians of  that  age,  he  accepted  with  implicit  faith 
all  the  miraculous  legends  of  the  gospels  except 
that  of  the  Virgin  birth.  Within  a  charmed 
circle  he  shrank  from  applying  his  own  canons  of 
criticism.  Leslie  Stephen2  remarks  of  Priestley 
that  "it  is  still  rather  difficult  to  understand 
how  so  versatile  and  daring  a  thinker  could  have 
retained  so  much  of  the  old  system."  But  the 
same  inconsistency  reveals  itself  in  numberless 
scholars  of  our  own  generation.  Bishop  Stubbs 
was  the  acutest  of  historical  critics  in  the  domain 
of  general  history,  but  to  the  Bible  and  to  early 
Church  history  he  brought  the  prejudices  of  a 
fourteenth-century  monk;  so  also  the  modern 

1  Tracts,  p.  259. 

2  English  Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  chap,  vii.,  §6, 


Some  Pioneers  125 

Bollandist  editors  of  the  Acts  of  the  Saints,  who 
are  Jesuits,  handle  any  legend  later  than  the  year 
100  with  the  greatest  freedom,  yet  abstain  from 
applying  the  same  rules  and  methods  of  histori- 
cal investigation  to  the  solution  and  sifting  out 
of  earlier  Christian  problems  and  narratives. 
The  same  remark  holds  good  of  the  Abbe 
Duchesne,  and  of  the  late  Bishop  Creighton — 
not  to  mention  countless  scholars  who  really 
seem  intent  on  running  with  the  hare  and 
hunting  with  the  hounds  at  one  and  the  same 
time. 

Priestley  also  undertook  to  answer  Evanson's 
arguments  in  a  work  which  contains  many 
suggestive  passages.  For  example,  he  points 
out  that 

the  books  called  the  Gospels  were  not  the 
cause,  but  the  effect,  of  the  belief  of  Christ- 
ianity in  the  first  ages.  For  Christianity  had 
been  propagated  with  great  success  long 
before  those  books  were  written;  nor  had 
the  publication  of  them  any  particular  effect 
in  adding  to  the  number  of  Christian  con- 
verts. Christians  received  the  books  be- 
cause they  knew  beforehand  that  the  contents 
of  them  were  true  (p.  8). 

The  last  of  these  statements  requires,  no 
doubt,  a  little  modification;  but  the  entire  pas- 
sage suggests  a  fertile  method  of  inquiry.  Emerg- 
ing in  the  bosom  of  an  already  long-established 


126          New  Testament   Criticism 

Christianity,  the  Gospels  could  not  fail  in  a 
large  degree  to  reflect  the  sentiments,  beliefs, 
prejudices,  ritual  practices,  which  arose  in 
measure  as  the  Faith  spread  among  the  Gentiles, 
was  persecuted  alike  by  Jews  and  Roman  Gov- 
ernment, was  coloured  by  Greek  philosophy,  was 
divorced  almost  wholly  from  the  scenes  of  its 
birth.  This  is  how  the  Abbe  Loisy  envisages  the 
whole  problem  of  criticism  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment. It  is  inseparable  from  an  investigation 
of  the  circles  of  believers,  called  Churches,  within 
whose  medium  the  Gospels  were  produced  and 
preserved.  We  have  to  determine  how  much  of 
the  record  was  primitive  by  separating  from  it 
all  accretions  due  to  this  medium.  If,  therefore, 
Priestley  had  followed  up  this  line  of  argument, 
he  might  have  anticipated  modern  criticism. 
But  he  was,  as  we  have  said,  a  mixture  of  en- 
lightenment and  superstition.  He  could  express 
himself  "greatly  obliged"  to  Evanson  for  the 
latter's  "  several  new  and  valuable  arguments 
against  the  miraculous  conception,"  yet  he 
accepted  the  fable  of  Balaam's  ass,  and  failed 
to  appreciate  Evanson's  argument  that  in  the 
thirty  years  or  more  which  by  common  con- 
sent elapsed  between  Jesus'  ministry  and  the 
emergence  of  the  earliest  evangelical  document 
there  was  ample  time  for  the  other  miraculous 
stories  of  Jesus  to  have  arisen  in  so  credulous  a 
medium  as  the  early  Church. 


CHAPTER  VII 
FOREIGN  WORK 

NO  work  recently  published  in  Germany  has 
made  a  greater  stir  in  England  than 
Albert  Schweitzer's  Von  Reimarus  zu  Wrede,  a 
systematic  resume  and  criticism  of  European 
study  of  the  Gospels  during  the  last  hundred 
years.  It  is  mortifying  to  us  Englishmen  to 
find  that  barely  one  page  in  a  hundred  of  this 
remarkable  book  is  devoted  to  works  written 
by  ourselves.  The  Germans,  and  in  a  measure 
the  French,  have  for  the  last  hundred  years  been 
making  serious  efforts  to  ascertain  the  truth 
about  Christian  origins.  Our  own  divines,  amid 
the  contentment  and  leisure  of  rich  livings  and 
deaneries,  and  with  the  libraries  and  endowments 
of  Oxford  and  Cambridge  at  their  disposal,  have 
done  nothing  except  produce  a  handful  of 
apologetic,  insincere,  and  worthless  volumes. 
The  only  books  which  in  England  have  advanced 
knowledge  have  been  translations  of  German  or 
French  authors,  and  not  long  since  our  well- 
endowed  professors  and  doctors  of  divinity 
127 


128  New  Testament  Criticism 

greeted  every  fresh  accession  to  Christian  learn- 
ing— when  they  could  not  ignore  it  and  maintain 
a  conspiracy  of  silence — with  dismal  howls  of 
execration  and  torrents  of  abuse.  To  three  of 
these  foreign  scholars,  whose  works  in  English 
translations  were  so  received,  we  must  now  turn. 
They  were  David  Friedrich  Strauss,  Ferdinand 
Christian  Baur  (both  Germans),  and  Ernest 
Renan,  a  Frenchman. 

Of  these  the  second  was  the  oldest;  he  was 
born  in  1792,  and  died  in  1860.  The  son  of  a 
Wurtemberg  clergyman,  he  was  still  further 
attracted  to  theological  study  by  the  influence 
of  Bengel,  his  uncle,  the  scholarly,  but  orthodox, 
leader  of  the  theological  school  in  the  University 
of  Tubingen  towards  the  close  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  He  was  first  a  pupil  and  then  a  teacher 
at  the  Blaubeuren  Seminary,  where  he  numbered 
Strauss  among  his  pupils.  Thence  he  was,  in 
1826,  promoted  to  a  professorship  at  Tubingen 
in  succession  to  Bengel.  His  geniality  and 
freedom  from  affectation  and  pedantry,  com- 
bined with  a  noble  presence,  were  enough  in 
themselves  to  attract  young  men  to  his  courses ; 
but  the  ring  of  sincerity,  the  underglow  of 
devotion  to  truth,  drew  to  him  the  affection  of 
all  the  finer  natures  among  them.  He  inspired 
hundreds  with  his  own  zeal  and  ardour  for 
learning,  his  bold  impartiality  in  pursuit  of  truth, 
and  without  conscious  effort  he  thus  created 


F.  C.  BAUR. 


129 


130          New  Testament  Criticism 

what  was  known  as  the  Tubingen  school,  still 
the  bogie  of  English  clergymen  when  I  was  myself 
a  youth  in  the  years  1875-1890.  In  this  school 
were  formed  such  scholars  as  E.  Zeller  (Baur's 
son-in-law),  K.  R.  Kostlin,  Adolf  Hilgenfeld  of 
Jena,  Otto  Pfleiderer  of  Berlin,  Gustav  Volkmar 
of  Zurich  (died  1896),  Edmond  Scherer  and 
Timothee  Colani  in  France,  the  founders  of  the 
Revue  de  Theologie. 

Baur  discerned  a  key  to  the  understanding 
of  early  Church  history  in  the  antagonism  be- 
tween Paul  and  his  school  on  the  one  side,  who 
desired  the  free  admission  of  uncircumcised 
Gentiles  into  the  Messianic  society  which 
gathered  around  the  memory  of  Jesus,  and  Peter 
and  John,  his  personal  disciples,  and  James,  his 
brother,  and  first  president  of  the  Church  of 
Jerusalem,  on  the  other.  The  latter  had  known 
Jesus  in  the  flesh,  and  insisted  on  the  observance 
of  the  Jewish  law  in  the  matter  of  food  and 
meats,  ablutions,  Sabbath  observance,  and 
circumcision.  They  would  have  confined  the 
new  "heresy"  or  following  of  Jesus  Christ  to 
Jews  and  orthodox  proselytes.  Through  the 
gate  of  the  old  law  alone  could  any  enter  the 
promised  Kingdom  which  a  deus  ex  machina  was 
soon  to  substitute  on  Jewish  soil  for  the  dis- 
graceful tyranny  of  a  Roman  governor  and  his 
legions.  This  antagonism  colours  the  four 
great  epistles  of  Paul,  Romans,  I  and  2  Corin- 


Foreign   Work  131 

thians,  and  Galatians,  and  the  hatred  of  Paul 
long  continued  among  the  Palestinian  Christians, 
who  caricatured  him  as  Simon  Magus,  and 
adopted  the  lifelike  personal  description  of  him 
which  still  survives  in  the  "Acts  of  Thekla"  as 
a  picture  of  the  Anti- Christ. 

This  antagonism  between  Peter  and  Paul,  the 
two  traditional  founders  of  the  leading  Church 
of  Rome,  was  for  the  Catholic  Church  a  sort  of 
skeleton  in  the  cupboard,  and  caused  much 
searching  of  hearts  among  the  orthodox  as  early 
as  the  fourth  century.  By  way  of  setting  their 
misgivings  at  rest,  Jerome  advanced  his  fa- 
mous hypothesis  that  the  dispute  with  Peter  re- 
lated by  Paul  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians  was 
no  more  than  a  comedy  arranged  between  the 
two  in  order  to  throw  Jewish  zealots  off  the  scent. 
In  general,  orthodox  historians  have  sought  to 
minimise  the  importance  of  the  matter;  they 
could  hardly  do  otherwise.  But  Baur  was  not 
a  man  to  wriggle  out  of  a  difficulty.  He  saw, 
and  rightly  saw,  its  importance;  and  he  tried 
to  reconstruct  the  chronological  order  of  the 
earliest  writings  of  the  Church  on  the  principle 
that  those  in  which  the  quarrel  is  still  open  and 
avowed  must  have  preceded  those  which  try  to 
gloss  it  over  and  to  pretend  that  it  was  never 
serious.  In  proportion,  Baur  argued,  as  the 
antagonism  died  down  and  leading  men  on  each 
side  drew  together  in  the  face  of  persecution  by 


i32  New  Testament  Criticism 

Jews  and  Romans,  and  of  the  disintegrating 
propaganda  of  the  Gnostics,  the  Catholic 
Church  emerged,  a  middle  party,  which  little 
by  little  absorbed  the  extremes,  and  whose 
literature  was  largely  inspired  by  the  wish  to 
conceal  even  the  scars  of  wounds  which  had  once 
bled  so  freely.  In  the  four  epistles  of  Paul  above 
named  the  quarrel  is  still  fresh  and  actual,  and 
therefore  they  are  the  most  primitive  documents 
we  have,  and  are  prior  to  the  year  70.  So  is 
the  Apocalypse,  an  Ebionite  document  breath- 
ing hatred  of  Paul.  The  Synoptic  Gospels  and 
Acts  were  written  in  the  interests  of  reconcilia- 
tion, and  followed,  instead  of  preceding,  the  lost 
gospels  of  Peter,[of  the  Hebrews,  of  the  Ebionites, 
of  the  Egyptians.  They  are  the  literary  pre- 
cipitate of  oral  tradition  going  back  in  certain 
particulars  to  the  Apostolic  age,  but,  as  docu- 
ments, hardly  earlier  than  the  middle  of  the 
second  century.  The  Gospel  of  Matthew  is  the 
earliest  of  them,  and  most  Ebionite;  then  came 
that  of  Luke,  of  which  the  elements  took  shape 
under  Pauline  influence.  It  is  an  amplification 
of  Marcion's  Gospel.  Last  is  Mark's,  a  neutral 
gospel,  made  up  of  odds  and  ends  from  the 
other  two.  The  rest  of  the  Pauline  epistles  are, 
all  of  them,  reconciliation  documents  of  about 
the  middle  of  the  second  century.  The  book 
called  Acts  is  an  irenicon  penned  to  show  how 
harmoniously  Peter  and  Paul  could  work  to- 


Foreign   Work  133 

gether,  and  what  good  friends  they  were.  The 
epistles  of  Peter  were  literary  forgeries  designed 
with  the  same  object,  and  the  Fourth  Gospel 
and  the  Epistles  of  John  are  later  than  160. 

The  fault  of  Baur  was  that  he  worked  his 
theory  for  more  than  it  was  worth;  that  he 
failed  to  give  due  weight  to  many  other  ideas 
and  tendencies  which  equally  influenced  the 
development  of  Church  opinion  and  literature; 
and,  lastly,  that  he  set  nearly  all  the  docu- 
ments at  least  fifty  years  too  late.  Later 
research  has  triumphantly  proved  that  Mark 
is  not  a  compilation  from  Matthew  and  Luke, 
but  their  basis,  and  that  our  Luke  was  in  Mar- 
cion's  hands,  and  mutilated  by  him  to  suit  his 
views.  Large  fragments  of  the  Gospel  of  Peter, 
and,  probably,  of  that  of  the  Egyptians,  have 
been  rescued  from  the  tombs  and  sands  of  Egypt ; 
and  it  turns  out  that,  even  if  they  were  not 
copied  or  imitated  from  the  Synoptics,  they 
were  certainly  not  their  sources.  Generally 
speaking,  they  are  more  modern  in  their  tone 
and  post- Galilean.  A  more  thorough  examina- 
tion of  the  idiom  and  vocabulary  of  i  Thessalo- 
nians,  Philippians,  and  Philemon  shows  that  these 
epistles  are  from  the  same  hand  which  penned 
the  four  undisputed  ones;  and  Baur's  greatest 
disciple,  Hilgenfeld,  has  shown  this  to  be  the 
case.  One  great  merit,  however,  must  anyhow  be 
ascribed  to  Baur,  that  of  forcing  all  subsequent 


134          New  Testament  Criticism 

investigators  to  consider  the  documents  purely 
in  relation  to  the  age  which'saw  their  birth,  and 
to  explain  them  from  the  influences  which  were 
at  work,  instead  of  envisaging  them  as  isolated 
works  of  detached  thinkers  and  teachers.  If  a 
book  seems  to  be  a  forgery,  we  must  at  once  ask 
Cui  bono — in  the  interests  of  what  and  of  whom 
was  it  forged?  If  it  is  admittedly  authentic,  its 
place  in  the  development  of  doctrine  and  opinion 
and,,  events,  the  phase  which  it  reflects,  must 
still  be  studied  and  set  forth.  Historical  per- 
spective is  all-important,  no  less  in  relation  to 
the  documents  of  the  early  Church  than  to  those 
of  any  other  literature.  This  must  ever  be  the 
most  fruitful  method  of  interpretation,  and  it  is 
a  hopeful  sign  that  even  Latin  ecclesiastics  are 
furtively  beginning  to  apply  it. 

Baur  had  approached  theology  through  the 
philosophy  of  Schleiermacher  and  Hegel.  "Ohne 
Philosophic,  "  he  wrote,  "bleibt  mir  die  Geschichte 
ewig  tod  und  stumm."1'  To  Strauss  also  (born 
1808,  died  1874)  philosophy  was  a  first  love, 
and  he  too  dreamed  of  framing  Church  history 
in  a  niche  of  Hegel's  system  of  logic.  He  studied 
at  Blaubeuren  under  Baur,  at  Maulbronn,  and 
in  Berlin,  and  in  1832  became  a  teacher  in  the 
University  of  Tubingen,  where  he  found  his  old 

1  "Without  philosophy  history  remains  for  me  ever 
dead  and  dumb." 


Foreign   Work  135 

master  Baur.  His  instinct  was  to  devote  him- 
self to  philosophical  teaching,  but  the  authorities 
obliged  him  to  remain  attached  to  the  theological 
faculty,  and  the  result  was  his  Leben  Jesu,  or 
"Life  of  Jesus,"  which  appeared  in  1835.  The 
work  was  a  gigantic  success.  He  woke  up  to 
find  himself  famous,  but  an  outcast  without  a 
future.  The  conservatives  denounced  him  to 
the  educational  authorities,  and  he  was  deprived 
of  his  modest  appointment  in  the  university. 
Barely  two  or  three  of  his  friends  had  the  courage 
to  take  up  the  cudgels  in  his  defence.  His  work 
went  through  many  editions,  by  no  means  re- 
prints of  one  another.  The  third,  for  example, 
made  some  concessions  to  the  orthodox  stand- 
point, which  he  took  back  in  the  later  editions. 
In  1839  the  chair  of  Dogmatic  at  Zurich  was 
offered  him,  but  there  such  an  uproar  was  raised 
by  pietists  that  the  Swiss  authorities  revoked 
the  appointment,  giving  him  a  small  pension 
instead.  After  that  he  spent  a  wandering  and 
rather  unhappy  life,  turning  his  pen  to  profane 
history  and  literary  criticism,  and  writing  among 
other  things  a  valuable  monograph  on  Reimarus. 
In  1864  he  returned  to  theology,  and  published 
A  Life  of  Jesus  for  the  German  People. 

In  his  preface  to  this  he  remarks  on  the  happy 
change  which  had  taken  place  in  public  opinion 
since  1835,  when  his  enemies  complained  that 
he  might  at  least  have  concealed  his  thoughts 


136  New  Testament  Criticism 

from  the  general  public  by  writing  in  Latin. 
In  fact,  the  very  outcry  against  him,  for  being 
pitched  in  so  shrill  a  key,  had  reached  the  ears 
of  the  multitude,  and  so  drawn  the  attention  of 
thousands  to  a  subject  of  which  they  would 
otherwise  have  remained  in  ignorance.  He 
closes  this  preface  with  an  acknowledgment  of 
the  value  of  Kenan's  work,  which  had  appeared 
in  the  interim.  "A  book,"  he  writes,  " which, 
almost  before  it  appeared,  was  condemned  by 
I  know  not  how  many  bishops,  and  by  the 
Roman  Curia  itself,  must  necessarily  be  a  most 
useful  book." 

Strauss  made  a  somewhat  ungenerous  attack 
on  the  French  nation  in  1870,  which  made  him 
popular  for  a  time  among  his  countrymen,  but 
which  cannot  be  otherwise  regarded  than  as  a 
stain  on  a  singularly  noble  and  upright  character. 
Beside  his  prose  works,  he  wrote  many  elegant 
and  touching  poems. 

Because  Strauss  summarily  eliminated  the 
supernatural  element,  it  has  been  assumed  that 
he  turned  the  entire  story  of  Jesus  into  myth— 
this  by  those  who  never  read  the  book  they 
denounced,  and  will  hear  nothing  of  a  Christ  who 
is  not  through  and  through  a  supernatural  being. 

The  truth  is  that  Strauss  understood  far  better 
than  the  reactionaries  of  1835  the  conditions 
under  which  the  gospels  took  shape,  and  the 
influences  which  moulded  their  narratives.  His 


DAVID  F.  STRAUSS. 
137 


138          New  Testament  Criticism 

critics  argued  that,  since  the  first  and  fourth 
evangelists  were  eye-witnesses  and  took  part  in 
the  miraculous  episodes,  their  narratives  cannot 
be  myths  in  any  sense  whatever.  Strauss  replied 
that  the  outside  evidence  in  favour  of  their 
having  been  eye-witnesses  is  slender,  and  the 
internal  evidence  nil.  In  this  matter  the  sub- 
sequent development  of  opinion,  even  in 
orthodox  Church  circles,  has  endorsed  Strauss's 
position.  No  one  now  contends  that  Matthew's 
Gospel  is  other  than  the  work  of  an  unknown 
writer  who  compiled  it  out  of  Mark's  Gospel  and 
Q,  the  common  document  of  Matthew  and  Luke. 
As  to  John,  Professor  Sanday,  the  last  upholder 
of  it,  sacrifices  its  historicity  when  he  argues 
that  none  but  an  apostle  would  have  taken 
such  liberties  with  the  life  of  his  Master; 
and  the  Rev.  J.  M.  Thompson,1  who  assuredly 
voices  the  opinion  of  the  younger  and  better 
educated  of  the  English  clergy,  pronounces  this 
gospel  to  be  "not  a  biography,  but  a  treatise  in 
theology."  "Its  author,"  he  goes  on  to  ob- 
serve, "would  be  almost  as  ready  to  sacrifice 
historical  truth  where  it  clashes  with  his  dog- 
matic purpose  as  he  is  (apparently)  anxious  to 
observe  it  where  it  illustrates  his  point." 

Strauss  displayed  more  insight  than  Baur 
when  he  declared  that  the  single  generation 
which  elapsed  between  the  death  of  Jesus  and 

1  Jesus  According  to  St.  Mark,  London,  1909,  p.  n. 


Foreign  Work  139 

the  date  of  the  earliest  gospel  was  amply  long 
enough  time  for  such  mythical  accretions  as  we 
find  to  gather  about  the  memory  of  Jesus. 
Messianic  ideas  of  the  Old  Testament,  early 
aspirations  of  believers,  the  desire  to  conform 
the  sparse  records  of  his  ministry  to  supposed 
prophecies  and  to  parallel  his  figure  with  those  of 
Moses  and  Elijah — these  and  many  other  in- 
fluences rapidly  generated  in  a  credulous  age  and 
society  the  Saga-like  tales  of  the  gospels  about 
his  miraculous  powers.  These  tales  Strauss 
discussed  in  a  chapter  entitled  "  Storm,  Sea, 
and  Fish  Stories. " 

Strauss  was  the  first  German  writer  to  discern 
the  emptiness  for  historical  purposes  of  the 
Fourth  Gospel,  which  Schleiermacher  had  in- 
vested with  a  halo  of  authority,  and  by  which 
even  Renan  was  deceived.  He  pronounced  it  to 
be  a  work  of  apologetic  Christology,  composed 
by  a  Gnostic  who  wished  to  uphold  the  flesh- 
and-blood  reality  of  Jesus  against  other  Gnostics 
who  denied  that  reality  and  resolved  him  into  a 
merely  phantasmal  being.  Advanced  critics  in 
that  age  lauded  this  gospel  because  it  contains 
so  little  eschatology.  That  single  fact,  replied 
Strauss,  convicts  it  of  being  both  late  and  false. 

Jesus  [he  wrote]  in  any  case  expected  that 
he  would  set  up  the  throne  of  David  afresh, 
and  with  the  help  of  his  twelve  disciples 
reign  over  a  liberated  people.  Yet  he  never 


140          New  Testament  Criticism 

set  any  trust  in  the  swords  of  human  followers 
(Luke  xxii.,  38,  Matt,  xxvi.,  52),  but  only  in 
the  legions  of  angels,  which  his  heavenly 
Father  would  send  to  his  aid  (Matt,  xxvi., 
53).  Wherever  he  speaks  of  his  advent  in 
Messianic  glory,  it  is  with  angels  and  heaven- 
ly Hosts  (i.e.,  not  with  human  warriors)  that 
he  surrounds  himself  (Matt,  xvi.,  27,  xxiv., 
30  ff.,  xxv.,  31) ;  before  the  majesty  of  a  Son 
of  Man  coming  in  the  clouds  of  heaven  the 
Gentiles  will  bow  without  any  drawing  of 
swords,  and  at  the  call  of  the  Angel's  trumpet 
will  along  with  the  dead  risen  from  their 
tombs  submit  themselves  for  judgment  to 
him  and  his  Twelve.  But  this  consumma- 
tion Jesus  did  not  hope  to  effect  by  his  own 
will;  he  left  it  to  the  heavenly  Father,  who 
alone  knows  the  right  moment  at  which  to 
bring  about  the  catastrophe  (Mark  xiii.,  32), 
to  give  him  the  signal.  That,  he  hoped, 
would  save  him  from  any  error  in  supposing 
that  the  end  was  reached  before  due  warning 
was  given.  Let  those  who  would  banish  this 
point  of  view  from  the  background  of  Jesus* 
Messianic  plan  and  outlook,  merely  because 
it  seems  to  turn  him  into  a  visionary,  only 
reflect  how  exactly  these  hopes  agreed  with 
the  long-cherished  Messianic  ideas  of  the 
Jews,  and  how  easily  even  a  sensible  man, 
breathing  the  contemporary  atmosphere  of 
supernaturalism,  and  shut  up  in  the  narrow 
circle  of  Jewish  nationality,  might  be  drawn 
over  to  a  belief,  however  superstitious  in  it- 
self, provided  only  it  embodied  the  national 
point  of  view  and  also  contained  certain 
elements  of  truth  and  grandeur. 


Foreign   Work  141 

The  eschatological  aspects  of  Jesus*  Gospel 
could  not  be  better  summed  up  than  in  the 
above;  and  equally  admirable  are  the  remarks 
which  follow  on  the  Last  Supper: 

When  Jesus  ended  this  feast  with  the  words, 
Henceforth  I  will  not  again  drink  of  the  fruit 
of  the  vine,  until  I  drink  it  with  you  new  in  my 
Father's  Kingdom,  he  must  have  anticipated 
that  the  Passover  would  be  celebrated  in  the 
Messianic  kingdom  with  special  solemnity. 
If,  therefore,  he  assures  his  disciples  that  he 
will  next  enjoy  this  annually  recurring  feast, 
not  in  this,  but  in  the  next  age  (<zori),  that 
shows  that  he  expected  this  pre- Messianic 
world-order  to  be  removed  and  the  Messianic 
to  take  its  place  within  the  year. 

Here  Strauss  anticipates  Wellhausen  and 
other  intelligent  commentators  of  to-day.  With 
the  same  firm  insight  he  traces  the  gradual  emer- 
gence in  Jesus  of  the  consciousness  that  he  was 
himself  the  promised  Messiah.  In  Matt,  xii.,  8, 
he  remarks,  here  again  anticipating  the  best 
recent  criticism,  that  the  Son  of  Man  in  the  text, 
"The  Son  of  Man  is  Lord  also  of  the  Sabbath," 
may  mean  simply  Man  in  general;  but  in  another 
class  of  passages,  where  Jesus  speaks  of  the  Son 
of  Man,  a  supernatural  person  is  intended  wholly 
distinct  from  himself,  as  the  Messiah  generically. 
This,  for  example,  is  the  natural  interpretation 
of  the  passage  Matt,  x.,  23,  where  at  the  sending 


142  New  Testament  Criticism 

forth  of  the  disciples  he  assures  them  that  they 
will  not  have  completed  their  tour  of  the  Jewish 
cities  before  the  Son  of  Man  shall  come.  Here 
surely  Jesus  speaks  of  the  Messiah  as  being 
himself  the  Messiah's  forerunner.  In  that  case 
this  utterance  must  belong  to  the  earliest  period 
of  his  career,  before  he  recognised  himself  to 
be  the  Messiah.  As  Dr.  Schweitzer,  to  whom 
I  am  indebted  for  the  above  remarks,  says  (p. 
89),  Strauss  hardly  realised  the  importance  of 
the  remark  which  he  here  throws  out,  but  it 
contains  the  kernel  of  the  solution  of  the  problem 
of  the  Son  of  Man  recently  provided  by  the  most 
acute  of  German  critics,  Johannes  Weiss.1 

Strauss  also  goes  far  to  explain  the  genesis  of 
Paul's  conception  of  Jesus  as  a  pre-existent  being. 
Jesus,  he  argues,  clearly  conceived  of  his  Messi- 
anic role  as  involving  this  much — namely,  that 
he,  the  Born  of  Earth,  was  to  be  taken  up  into 
heaven  after  he  had  completed  his  earthly 
career,  and  was  to  return  thence  in  glory  in  order 
to  inaugurate  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  earth. 

Now,  in  the  higher  Jewish  theology,  im- 
mediately after  the  age  of  Jesus,  we  meet  with 
the  idea  of  a  pre-existence  of  the  Messiah. 
The  supposition,  therefore,  lies  near  at  hand 
that  the  same  idea  was  already  current  at  the 

1  Die  Predigt  Jesu  vom  Reiche  Gottes — i.e.,  "Jesus' 
Preaching  of  the  kingdom  of  God."  First  edition  1892, 
second  1900. 


Foreign   Work  143 

time  when  Jesus  was  becoming  known;  and 
that — once  he  apprehended  himself  as  Mes- 
siah— he  may  have  appropriated  to  himself 
this  further  trait  of  Messianic  portraiture. 
The  only  question  is  whether  Jesus  was  so 
deeply  initiated  as  Paul  in  the  school- wisdom 
of  his  age,  so  as  to  have  borrowed  from  it  this 
notion. 

That  Jesus  exoected  to  come  amid  clouds  and 
with  the  angelic  hosts  to  usher  in  his  kingdom  is, 
according  to  Strauss,  quite  certain.  The  only 
question  is  whether  he  expected  his  own  death 
to  intervene,  or  only  thought  that  the  glorious 
moment  would  surprise  him  in  the  midst  of  this 
life.  From  Matt,  x.,  23  and  xvi.,  28  one  might 
infer  the  latter.  But  it  always  remains  possible 
that,  supposing  he  later  on  came  to  anticipate 
his  death  as  certain,  his  ideas  may  have  shaped 
themselves  by  way  of  a  final  form  into  what  is 
expressed  in  Matt,  xxvi.,  64. 

Strauss 's  chief  defect  was  that  he  did  not  pay 
enough  attention  to  the  relations  in  which  the 
Synoptic  gospels  stand  to  one  another,  and  his 
neglect  of  this  problem  obscured  for  him  many 
features  of  the  first  and  third  gospels.  Like 
Schleiermacher,  he  believed  Mark's  gospel  to  be 
a  mere  compilation  from  the  other  two,  and 
regarded  it  as  a  satellite  of  Matthew's  gospel 
without  any  light  of  its  own.  «The  many  graphic 
touches  which  distinguish  this  gospel  were,  so 


144          New  Testament  Criticism 

he  argued,  Saga-like  exaggerations  of  the  com- 
piler. His  work  would  have  gained  in  clearness 
and  grasp  if  he  had  understood  that  Mark's  gos- 
pel forms  the  basis  of  the  other  two  Synoptists, 
and  furnishes  them  with  the  order  in  which  they 
arrange  their  incidents.  Without  this  clue  a 
critic  or  commentator  is  sure  to  go  beating  about 
the  bush  after  the  manner  of  an  old-fashioned 
harmonist,  here  laying  stress  on  Matthew's 
sequence  of  events,  there  upon  Luke's;  whereas, 
in  point  of  fact,  neither  of  them  had  any  real 
guide  except  Mark,  from  whose  order  of  events 
they  only  departed  in  order  to  pursue  that  of 
their  unassisted  imaginations. 

The  circumstances  of  Kenan's  life  are  so  well 
known  that  I  need  not  repeat  them.  Who  has 
not  read  that  most  exquisite  of  autobiographies, 
the  Souvenirs  dj  Enfance  et  de  Jeunesse,  in  which 
he  leads  us  along  the  path  of  his  intellectual 
emancipation  from  being  the  inmate  of  a  clerical 
seminary,  first  in  his  native  Breton  village  and 
then  in  Paris,  to  becoming  the  author  of  The 
Life  of  Jesus,  The  Apostles  (1866), z  St.  Paul 
(1869),  Antichrist  (1873),  The  Gospels  (1877), 
Marcus  Aurelius  (1881).  These  volumes  will 
continue  to  be  read  for  their  glamour  of  style, 
no  less  than  for  their  candour  and  nobility  of 
sentiment;  for  on  all  that  he  wrote,  however 
technical  and  learned  the  subject-matter,  Renan 

1  Translated  by  W.  G.  Hutchison  for  the  R.  P.  A.,  1905. 


ERNEST  RENAN. 
145 


146          New  Testament  Criticism 

set  the  stamp  of  his  character  and  personality. 
But  these  volumes  also  impress  us  by  the  vast 
•  learning  which  lies  behind  them.  German 
theologians  too  often  overwhelm  us  by  their 
learning,  and  in  reading  them  we  cannot  see  the 
wood  for  the  trees.  But  Renan  never  commit- 
ted this  fault.  Hardly  a  page  of  his  that  does 
not  help  us  to  a  clear  perspective  of  the  period 
and  subject  he  is  handling.  He  contrasts  with 
clumsy  but  learned  writers  like  Keim,  as  a  grace* 
ful  symmetrical  city  like  Perugia  set  on  a  hill 
amid  Italian  skies  contrasts  with  an  English 
manufacturing  city,  a  planless  congeries  of  vul- 
gar abominations  framed  in  grime  and  smoke 
and  dirt.  The  fanatics  chased  Renan  in  1862 
from  the  chair  he  held  of  Semitic  Studies,  and 
he  was  only  restored  by  the  French  Republic  in 
1871 ;  but  he  was  not  in  the  least  embittered  by 
the  experience,  and,  in  spite  of  their  volleys  of 
execration,  he  continued  to  the  end  to  cherish 
the  kindliest  feelings  towards  a  clergy  he  had  so 
narrowly  escaped  from  joining. 

Of  the  works  enumerated  The  Life  of  Jesus, 
though  it  is  the  best  known,  is  not  the  most 
valuable;  for  when  he  wrote  it  Renan  was  still 
under  the  spell  of  the  fourth  gospel,  and  inclined 
to  use  it  as  an  embodiment  of  genuine  traditions 
unknown  to  and  therefore  unrecorded  by  the 
three  other  evangelists.  Then,  again,  his  por- 
traiture of  Jesus  as  a  simpering,  sentimental 


Foreign   Work  147 

person,  sometimes  stooping  to  tricks,  must  grate 
upon  many  who  yet  are  not  in  the  least  devout 
believers. 

There  is  thus  some  justification  for  Schweit- 
zer's verdict  that  it  is  waxworks,  lyrical  and 
stagey.  Renan,  however,  in  approaching  the 
study  of  the  gospels,  had  at  least  the  great 
advantage  of  being  a  good  Hebrew  and  Talmudic 
scholar;  and  only  want  of  space  forbids  me  to 
cite  many  excellent  passages  inspired  by  this 
lore.  The  single  one  I  can  give  is  from  Les 
Evangiles,  p.  97,  and  bears  on  the  date  of  the 
Synoptic  Gospels: 

We  doubt  whether  this  collection  of  narra- 
tives, aphorisms,  parables,  prophetic  citations, 
can  have  been  committed  to  writing  earlier 
than  the  death  of  the  Apostles  and  before 
the  destruction  of  Jerusalem.  It  is  towards 
the  year  75  that  we  conjecturally  set  the 
moment  at  which  were  sketched  out  the 
features  of  that  image  before  which  eighteen 
centuries  have  knelt.  Batanea,  where  the 
brethren  of  Jesus  lived,  and  whither  the 
remains  of  the  Church  of  Jerusalem  had  fled, 
seems  to  have  been  the  district  where  this 
important  work  was  accomplished.  The 
language  used  was  that  in  which  Jesus'  own 
words — words  that  men  knew  by  heart — 
were  couched;  that  is  to  say,  the  Syro-Chal- 
daic,  wrongly  denominated  Hebrew.  Jesus' 
brethren  and  the  refugee  Christians  from 
Jerusalem  spoke  this  language,  which  indeed 


148          New  Testament  Criticism 

i 

differed  little  from  that  of  such  inhabitants  of 
Batanea  as  had  not  adopted  Greek.  It  was 
in  this  dialect,  obscure  and  devoid  of  literary 
culture,  that  was  traced  the  first  pencil  sketch 
of  the  book  which  has  charmed  so  many  souls. 
No  doubt,  if  the  Gospel  had  remained  a 
Hebrew  or  Syriac  book,  its  fortunes  would 
soon  have  been  cut  short.  It  was  in  a  Greek 
dress  that  the  Gospel  was  destined  to  reach 
perfection  and  assume  the  final  form  in 
which  it  has  gone  round  the  world.  Still 
we  must  not  forget  that  the  Gospel  was,  to 
begin  with,  a  Syrian  book,  written  in  a 
Semitic  language.  The  style  of  the  Gospel, 
that  charming  trick  of  childlike  narrative 
which  recalls  the  limpidest  pages  of  the  old 
Hebrew  Scriptures,  pervaded  by  a  sort  of  ideal 
ether  that  the  ancient  people  knew  not,  has 
in  it  nothing  Hellenic.  It  is  based  on  Hebrew. 

In  this  volume  Renan  corrected  the  error  into 
which  he  had  fallen  of  overrating  the  historical 
value  of  the  fourth  gospel.  His  appreciations  of 
the  other  gospels  are  very  just,  and  he  rightly 
rejects  the  opinion,  which  still  governed  most 
minds,  that  the  second  gospel  is  a  compilation 
from  the  first  and  third. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
ENGLISH  WORK 

FAR  back  in  the  nineteenth  century  the  task 
of  introducing  to  the  English  public  in 
translations  the  works  of  the  more  scholarly 
and  open  -  minded  German  theologians  was 
already  begun,  and  Strauss 's  Life  of  Jesus  was 
twice  published  in  our  tongue,  first  in  1846, 
and  again  in  1865.  The  earlier  translator  de- 
plores the  fact  that  "no  respectable  English 
publisher"  would  attempt  the  publication  of 
his  book  "from  a  fear  of  persecution."  The 
Anglican  clergy,  much  more  the  Nonconformist, 
remained  untouched  by  the  new  learning  until 
the  last  two  or  three  decades  of  that  century; 
and  it  is  a  significant  fact  that  the  only  work 
of  its  middle  time  which  really  threw  light  on 
the  composition  of  the  gospels,  or  would  have 
done  so  could  any  one  in  theological  circles  have 
been  induced  to  read  it,  was  the  work  of  a  lay- 
man, James  Smith,  of  Jordanhill,  a  leading  geo- 
logist and  a  F.R.S.  In  his  Dissertation  on  the 
Origin  and  Connection  of  the  Gospels  (Black- 
149 


15°          New  Testament  Criticism 

wood,  1853)  we  find  an  abundance  of  shrewd 
surmises  and  conclusions.  Thus,  a  propos  of 
the  multiplicity  of  readings  found  in  MSS. — a 
multiplicity  which  sorely  scandalised  the  be- 
lievers in  verbal  inspiration,  who  were  puzzled 
to  say  which  one  of  ten  different  readings  in  a 
single  passage  was  due  to  the  Holy  Ghost  rather 
than  to  a  copyist — Smith  remarks  that  "there 
is  a  greater  amount  of  verbal  agreement  in  the 
more  modern  MSS.  than  we  find  in  the  earliest 
existing  ones."  Here  is  a  truth  to  which  critics 
are  only  just  now  waking  up — viz.,  that  the 
text  was  never  in  any  degree  fixed  until  it  was 
canonised  and  consecrated.  Till  then  it  was 
more  or  less  in  flux.  For  the  rest,  Smith  argued 
that  Luke  and  Matthew  used  the  Hebrew 
original,  of  which  Mark  was  the  translator, 
rather  than  that  they  used  our  Mark.  This 
was  an  error,  but  an  error  in  the  direction  of  the 
truth.  It  is  impossible,  however,  to  acquiesce 
in  the  view  that  the  agreement  between  Mat- 
thew and  Mark  is  translational  only,  except 
in  so  far  as  Mark  in  rendering  his  source  (as  to 
which  Smith  accepted  Papias's  tradition  that 
he  was  interpreter  of  Peter)  made  much  use  of 
an  earlier  version  of  the  same  made  by  Matthew. 
Luke,  he  believed,  wrote  with  both  Mark  and 
Matthew  before  him. 

But  Smith's  real  achievement  was  to  over- 
throw the  old  superstition  that  inspired  evan- 


English  Work  151 

gelists  could  not  have  written  at  all  except 
in  complete  independence  of  one  another,  and 
without  the  servile  necessity  of  copying  com- 
mon documents.  English  divines  rightly  felt 
that  the  citadel  of  inspiration  was  breached  if 
it  were  once  proved  that  the  Evangelists  copied 
either  one  another  or  common  documents;  and 
sound  criticism  could  not  take  root  among 
them  until  this  prejudice  was  dispelled.  It 
has  practically  vanished  to-day;  but  it  vanished 
tardily,  and  divines  are  now  employed  in  de- 
vising plasters  and  bandages  to  cover  the 
wounds  inflicted  on  their  faith.  It  seems 
strange  that  nineteenth-century  divines  could 
not  admit  what,  as  James  Smith  remarks, 
was  obvious  to  the  early  Fathers;  yet  so  it  was. 
For  example,  Augustine  wrote  thus  of  the 
Evangelists : — 

We  do  not  find  that  they  were  minded, 
each  of  them,  to  write  as  if  he  was  ignorant 
of  his  fellow  who  went  before  him,  nor  that 
the  one  left  out  by  ignorance  what  we  find 
another  writing.1 

Augustine  also  believed  that  Mark  had  Mat- 
thew before  him,  and  followed  him. 

Even  the  celebrated  Dr.  Lardner,  in  his 
History  of  the  Apostles  and  Evangelists,  was 
wedded  to  this  hypothesis  of  the  mutual  inde- 

1  De  Cons,  Evang.,  i.,  c.  i. 


152  New  Testament  Criticism 

pendence  of  the  gospels.  He  and  others  of  his 
age  deemed  it  to  be  evident  from  the  nature 
and  design  of  the  first  three  gospels  that  their 
authors  had  not  seen  any  authentic  history  of 
Jesus  Christ;  and  the  fact  that  the  Synoptists 
"have  several  things  peculiar  to  themselves'* 
was  held  to  "show  that  they  did  not  borrow 
from  each  other1;"  yet  more  "the  seeming 
[mark  well  the  meiosis  of  the  professional 
divine!]  contradictions  which  exist  in  the  first 
three  gospels"  were  adduced  as  "evidence  that 
the  Evangelists  did  not  write  by  concert,  or 
after  having  seen  each  other's  gospels." 

Dr.  Davidson,  a  comparatively  liberal  divine, 
and  one  who  suffered  for  his  liberality,  argued  in 
the  same  way  in  his  Introduction  to  the  New 
Testament.  Smith,  however,  wrote  in  answer  as 
follows : 

There  is  not  a  single  phenomenon  ad- 
duced in  proof  that  the  Evangelists  made 
no  use  of  the  works  of  their  predecessors, 
but  what  may  be  met  with  in  these  modern 
contemporary  historians,  in  cases  where  we 
know  that  they  did  make  use  of  the  works 
of  their  predecessors. 

This  position  he  proved  incontestably  by  con- 
fronting in  parallel  columns  narratives  of  the 
same  incidents  written  by  Sir  Archibald  Alison 

1  So  Home  in  his  now  forgotten  Introduction  to  the  Bible. 


English  Work  153 

in  his  History  of  the  French  Revolution^  by  Gen- 
eral Napier,  and  by  Suchet  in  his  Memoirs  of 
the  war  in  Spain.  Napier  was  an  eye-witness, 
and  also  used  Suchet.  Alison  used  both.  To  the 
divines  of  that  generation  who  fell  back  on  the 
soft  option  of  oral  tradition,  because  that  alter- 
native was  to  their  minds  least  incompatible 
with  verbal  inspiration,  Smith  replied  in  words 
which  put  the  matter  in  a  nutshell.  He  writes 
(p.  xlviii.): 

A  stereotyped  cyclus  of  oral  tradition  never 
did  nor  ever  can  exist.  Even  poetry  cannot 
be  repeated  without  variations. 

There  is  one  phenomenon  peculiar  to 
compositions  derived  from  the  same  written 
sources,  which  may  be  termed  the  phenome- 
non of  tallying.  The  writers  may  add  mat- 
ter drawn  from  other  sources,  or  they  leave 
out  passages;  but  ever  and  anon  they  return 
to  the  original  authority,  where  they  will 
be  found  to  tally  with  each  other;  but  it  is 
only  in  such  cases  that  such  correspondences 
occur.  Hence,  when  they  do  occur,  we 
are  warranted  in  inferring  the  existence  of  a 
written  original. 

Mr.  W.  G.  Rushbrooke,  at  the  instance  and 
with  the  assistance  of  the  Rev.  Dr.  Edwin  A. 
Abbott,1  Headmaster  of  the  City  of  London 

1  With  the  collaboration  of  another  distinguished  Cam- 
bridge scholar,  Dr.  Hort. 


154          New  Testament  Criticism 

School,  finally  settled  the  matter  »in  a  work 
entitled  Synopticon  (London,  1880).  In  this 
he  arranged  in  parallel  columns  the  texts  of 
Mark,  Matthew,  and  Luke,  picking  out  in  red 
whatever  is  common  to  all  three,  and  in  other 
distinctive  types  whatever  any  two  of  them  share 
in  common.  The  originality  of  Mark  was  thus 
demonstrated  once  for  all.  There  are  barely 
half-a-dozen  passages  which  suggest  that  Mat- 
thew had  access  to  the  ulterior  documents  used 
by  Mark;  so  complete  is  his  dependence  on  the 
latter,  as  he  has  been  transmitted  to  us.  It 
was  not,  of  course,  a  new  view.  Herder  had 
discerned  the  fact,  and  the  German  scholar 
Lachmann  had  pointed  out  as  early  as  1835,  in 
his  Studien  und  Kritiken,  that  Mark  provided 
the  mould  in  which  the  matter  of  Matthew  and 
Luke  was  cast.  "The  diversity  of  order  in  the 
gospel  narratives  is,"  he  wrote,  "not  so  great 
as  appears  to  many.  It  is  greatest  if  you  com- 
pare them  all  with  one  another,  or  Luke  with 
Matthew ;  small  if  you  compare  Mark  separately 
with  the  other  two."  In  other  words,  Mark 
provides  the  common  term  between  Luke  and 
Matthew.  The  matter  is  so  plain  if  we  glance 
at  a  single  page  of  the  Synopticon  that  one  won- 
ders at  any  one  ever  having  had  any  doubts 

about  it. 

* 

And  here  we  are  led  to  refer  to  the  famous 
controversy  between  Bishop  Lightfoot  and  the 


English  Work  155 

author  of  3  work  entitled  Supernatural  Religion, 
of  which  the  first  edition  appeared  in  1874 
anonymously  from  the  pen  of  Mr.  Walter  R. 
Gassels.  In  that  work  it  was  argued  that  our 
Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Mark  cannot  be 
those  signified  by  Papias,  whose  words,  as 
quoted  by  Eusebius,  run  thus: 

Mark  became  the  interpreter  of  Peter, 
and  wrote  down  accurately  as  much  as  he 
(?  Mark  or  Peter)  remembered  (or  re- 
minded him  of),  not,  however,  in  order,  of 
what  was  either  said  or  done  by  Christ. 
For  he  neither  heard  the  Lord,  nor  was  one 
of  his  followers;  but  later  on  became,  as  I 
have  said,  a  follower  of  Peter,  who  suited  his 
teachings  to  people's  needs,  without  making 
an  orderly  array  of  the  Dominical  words;  so 
that  Mark  committed  no  error  in  thus  writ- 
ing down  certain  things  as  he  could  re- 
collect them;  for  his  one  concern  was  to 
omit  nothing  he  heard,  and  to  falsify  no- 
thing therein. 

Matthew,  however,  composed  (or  set  in 
order)  the  Logia  (or  oracles)  in  the  Hebrew 
dialect,  and  every  one  interpreted  them  as 
best  he  could. 

Lightfoot  waxed  ironical,  because  the  author 
of  Supernatural  Religion  questioned  if  our  Mark 
were  the  same  as  the  Mark  of  Papias.  But,  if 
Papias's  Matthew  was  quite  another  document 
than  ours,  why  not  also  his  Mark? — the  more  so 


156          New  Testament  Criticism 

because  his  description  of  Mark  as  a  work  de- 
void of  chronological  order  ill  suits  the  Mark 
which  stands  in  our  Bibles;  for  the  latter  is 
most  careful  about  the  order  of  events,  and  pro- 
vides a  skeleton  order  for  the  other  two  Evan- 
gelists. Except  in  so  far  as  they  both  follow 
Mark,  the  two  other  Synoptists  exhibit  no 
order  of  events  whatever. 

For  the  rest,  Lightfoot  proved  that  his  an- 
tagonist misinterpreted  Eusebius's  use  of  Pa- 
pias.  For  where  the  historian  merely  states 
that  Papias  used  and  quoted  certain  books  of 
the  New  Testament — like  the  Johannine  Epis- 
tles— which,  as  not  being  accepted  by  all  the 
Churches,  were  called  Antilegomena,  Mr.  Cas- 
sels  over-hastily  inferred  Eusebius  to  mean  that 
Papias  did  not  know  of  other  cognate  Scrip- 
tures universally  received  in  the  Eusebian  age; 
for  example,  the  fourth  gospel.  In  the  case 
of  generally  received  books,  Eusebius  was  not 
concerned  to  inform  us  whether  or  not  he  had 
found  them  cited  in  Papias,  and  therefore  in 
such  cases  no  argument  can  be  based  on  his 
silence.  Papias  may  or  may  not  have  had 
them.  We  only  know  for  certain  that  he  had 
those  of  the  Antilegomena,  which  Eusebius 
declares  he  had. 

The  Bishop  was  also  able  to  pick  a  few  holes 
in  his  adversary's  scholarship,  and  to  refute  his 
thesis  that  our  Luke  is  merely  a  later  edition  of 


English  Work  157 

Marcion's  Gospel.  He  could  not,  however, 
touch  the  chapter  on  the  Authorship  and  Char- 
acter of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  and  had  nothing  to 
oppose  to  the  remarkable  opening  chapters  on 
Miracles,  except  the  usual  commonplaces  of 
hazy  pietism.  In  critical  outlook  Lightfoot 
held  no  superiority,  though  he  was  a  better 
scholar  and,  within  the  narrow  circle  of  his 
premises,  a  more  careful  and  accurate  worker. 

Not  that,  on  the  other  hand,  the  book  he 
criticised  has  not  grave  shortcomings.  In 
general  it  underestimates  the  external  evidence 
in  favour  of  the  age  of  the  Synoptic  gospels; 
and  its  author  has  no  clear  idea  either  of  the 
relations  in  which  they  stand  to  each  other, 
or  of  the  supreme  importance  of  ascertaining 
those  relations  correctly.  He  moved  exclu- 
sively in  the  circle  of  Baur's  ideas,  and  had  neg- 
lected other  German  books  of  equal  weight,  like 
those  of  C.  H.  Weisse  and  C.  G.  Wilke,  pub- 
lished in  1838.  The  index  of  the  book  has 
no  reference  to  the  eschatolqgy  of  the  gospels 
and  of  Paul;  and  to  this  important  subject  it 
contains  few,  and  those  few  the  most  meagre, 
references.  In  all  these  respects,  however, 
Dr.  Lightfoot  was  as  poorly  equipped  as  Mr. 
Cassels. 

Another  famous  controversy  which  aroused 
the  Oxford  and  Cambridge  of  my  youth  (1880- 
1890)  was  that  of  Dean  Burgon  with  the  Re- 


158          New  Testament  Criticism 

visers  of  the  English  Bible,  and  especially 
of  the  New  Testament.  This  quarrel  raged 
around  the  so-called  Received  Text,  or  Textus 
Receptus.  Before  the  year  1633  such  a  term 
was  unknown;  but  in  that  year  the  Elzevir  firm 
in  Leiden  and  Amsterdam  issued  a  slightly 
revised  text  of  Beza's  New  Testament  (of  1565), 
which  was,  in  turn,  little  more  than  a  reprint 
of  Stephanus's  or  Estienne's  fourth  edition  of 
1551.  That,  in  turn,  was  a  reprint  of  a  large 
edition  called  the  Regia,  or  Royal,  which  gave 
Erasmus's  first  text  with  variants  from  fifteen 
MSS.,  and  from  the  Spanish  Editio  Princeps 
of  Alcala.  Erasmus's  edition  was  based  on 
half-a-dozen  late  MSS.  Now,  an  unknown 
scholar  who  prepared  this  edition  of  1633  wrote 
in  his  preface  the  words:  "Here,  then,  you 
have  the  text  now  received  by  all,  in  which  we 
give  nothing  altered  or  corrupt." 

Altered  from  what?  There  was  no  stand- 
ard, save  the  earlier  editions,  and  these  re- 
presented only  a  score  or  so  of  the  1300  cursive 
MSS.  now  known  to  exist,  and  not  a  single  one 
of  the  twelve  great  uncial  MSS.  of  tlm  gospels 
ranging  from  the  fourth  to  the  ninttfi  century. 
During  the  eighteenth  century  further- Editions 
were  issued  of  the  New  Testament  by  such 
scholars  as  John  Mill,  Wells,  Bentley,  and  Mace 
in  England;  by  Bengel,  Wettstein,  Semler, 
Griesbach,  and  Matthai  abroad,  who  continually 


W.  J.  BURGON 

Dean  of  Chichester. 
159 


160          New  Testament  Criticism 

collated  fresh  MSS.  and  ancient  versions,  either 
adding  the  new  variants  below  the  text  or  even 
introducing  them  into  the  text.  In  the  nine- 
teenth century  O|rl  Lachmann  (1831)  issued  at 
Berlin  the  first  Really  scientific  text  of  the  New 
Testament.  He"  followed  the  earliest  MSS.,  and 
gave  weight  to'  the  very  ancient  Latin  versions 
of  Africa  and  Italy.  He  remarked  that  an 
editor  who  confined  himself  to  the  most  ancient 
sources  could  find  no  use  for  the  so-called  Re- 
ceived Text;  and  he  accordingly  relegated  the 
readings  of  this  to  the  obscurity  of  an  appendix. 
He  followed  up  this  edition  with  later  ones  in 
1842  and  1850,  expanding  each  time  his  critical 
apparatus.1 

If  Lachmann  had  been  an  orthodox  divine,  he 
might  have  shrunk  from  such  innovations;  but 
he  was  primarily  a  classical  scholar,  concerned 
with  the  texts  of  Homer,  Lucretius,  and  other 
profane  authors;  and  he  merely  brought  to  the 
study  of  the  New  Testament  text  the  critical 
canons  and  the  principles  of  candour  and  hon- 
esty in  common  vogue  among  classical  philolo- 
gists. But  he  reaped  the  reward  of  unpopularity 
which  is  in  store  for  all  who  discover  anything 
that  is  new  or  true  in  the  field  of  religion.  The 

1  Critical  apparatus  is  the  technical  term  for  the  tabu- 
lated textual  variants  taken  from  MSS.  and  added,  some- 
times with  conjectural  emendations  of  the  editor  himself, 
underneath  a  classical  text. 


English  Work  161 

pietists  had  been  growling  for  over  a  century 
at  the  number  of  various  readings  printed  by 
scholars  in  their  editions  of  the  New  Testament, 
and  cudgelling  their  brains  how  to  reconcile  all 
these  diversities  of  text  and  meaning  with  the 
supposed  inspiration  of  the  book.  To  such 
minds  Lachmann's  edition,  which  set  aside 
with  contempt  the  entire  Textus  Receptus, 
savoured  of  open  blasphemy,  and  in  a  hundred 
keys  they  let  him  know  it.  But  the  world  was 
moving,  and  the  new  developments  of  Old 
Testament  criticism  encouraged  students  of  the 
New  Testament  to  bolder  flights.  Colenso 
seemed  to  suffer  for  the  advancement  of  Hebrew 
studies  only;  but  the  persecutions  he  endured 
nerved  younger  men  with  honest  hearts  to  under- 
take the  study  of  the  New  Testament  in  the 
same  free  spirit.  In  Germany  Constantine 
Tischendorf  carried  on  the  good  work  of  Lach- 
mann,  discovering  and  editing  many  new  MSS., 
and  in  particular  the  great  uncial  of  the  Con- 
vent of  Sinai,  called  by  scholars  Aleph.  In 
England  Scrivener,  Tregelles,  Westcott,  and 
Hort  devoted  their  lives  to  the  accumulation  of 
new  material  and  to  the  preparation  of  better 
editions. 

At  last,  in  1870,  the  English  clergy  awoke  to 
the  fact  that  the  Received  Text  as  given  in  the 
old  authorised  version  of  King  James's  trans- 
lators was  no  longer  satisfactory,  and  the  two 


162          New  ^Testament  Criticism 

Houses  of  Collocation  appointed  a  body  of 
revisers  to  prepare  a  new  English  version. 
This  was  issued  in  1881,  and  the  editors  state 
in  their  preface  the  reasons  which  justified  its 
appearance.  The  ^editions  of  Stephanus  and 
Beza,  and  the  ComplutenSian  Polyglott,  from 
which  the  authorised  English  version  was  made, 
were,  they  allege,  "based  on  manuscripts  of 
late  date,  few  in  number,  and  used  with  little 
critical  skill." 

This  Revised  Version  of  1881  marks  a  great 
advance  in  interpretation  in  so  far  as  it  is  based 
on  the  earliest  known  MSS.,  and  especially  on 
the  great  uncials;  and  also  in  that,  wherever 
practicable,  it  adheres  to  the  same  English 
equivalent  of  a  Greek  word  or  phrase.  This 
uniformity  in  the  rendering  of  the  same  words 
enables  a  student  who  knows  no  Greek  to  trace 
out  accurately  the  triple  and  double  traditions  in 
the  texts  of  the  gospels.  Its  defects  briefly  are, 
firstly,  that,  owing  to  the  number  of  the  scholars 
employed  in  revising,  and  the  difficulty  of  getting 
them  to  agree,  the  text  often  has  the  patch- 
work appearance  of  a  compromise;  and,  se- 
condly, that,  inasmuch  as  they  were  orthodox  and 
somewhat  timid  divines,  the  more  orthodox  of 
two  or  more  ancient  readings  or  interpretations 
is  commonly  printed  in  the  text,  the  rival  ones 
being  consigned  to  the  margin  or  altogether 


English  Work  .  163 

* 

ignored  for  fear  of  shocking  the  weaker  brethren. 
A  genuine  scholar  detects  on  rrtany  a  page  of  it 
the  work  of  rather  weak-kneed*  people. 

None  the  less  it  was  too  strong  meat  for  the 
run  of  the  English  clergy,  wjao  found  a  spokes- 
man in  the  Rev.  William  Burgon,  a  Fellow  of 
Oriel  College  in  Oxford,  vicar  of  the  University 
Church,  and  finally  Dean  of  Chichester,  an  old- 
fashioned  scholar  of  much  learning,  and  a  master 
of  mordant  wit  and  incisive  language.  He 
fell  upon  his  fellow- divines  with  a  fury  which 
provoked  much  amusement  among  the  scoffers, 
and  if  his  bon-mots  could  have  been  printed 
in  a  cheap  form  and  disseminated  among  the 
<&t  crowd,  I  venture  to  think  they  would  have 
been  more  effective  than  all  the  lectures  of 
Mr.  Bradlaugh  and  Colonel  Ingersoll  for  the 
cause  that  those  lecturers  had  at  heart.  I 
copy  out  a  few  flosculi  from  the  good  Dean's 
articles  in  the  Quarterly  Review,  entitled  "The 
Revision  Revised,"  and  from  his  Epistle  of 
Protest  addressed  to  Bishop  Ellicott,  who 
had  acted  as  president  of  the  committee  of 
Revisers. 

Drs.  Westcott  and  Hort,  of  Cambridge, 
were  by  far  the  most  competent  of  the  Re- 
visers, who  as  a  rule  deferred,  and  wisely,  to 
their  judgment,  taking  as  their  standard  the 
Greek  text  of  the  New  Testament  prepared  by 


164          New  Testament  Criticism 

them.     Of    these    scholars,    therefore,    Burgon 
writes : 

The  absolute  absurdity  (I  use  the  word 
advisedly)  of  Westcott  and  Hort's  New 
Textual  Theory.  .  .  . 

In  their  solemn  pages  an  attentive  reader 
finds  himself  encountered  by  nothing  but  a 
series  of  unsupported  assumptions.  .  .  . 

Their  (so-called)  "Theory"  is  in  reality 
nothing  else  but  a  weak  effort  of  the  imagina- 
tion. 

Of  the  Revision  itself  he  writes : 

It  is  the  most  astonishing  as  well  as  the 
most  calamitous  literary  blunder  of  the 
age.  .  ^.  . 

Their  [the  Revisers']  uncouth  phraseology 
and  their  jerky  sentences,  their  pedantic  ob- 
scurity and  their  unidiomatic  English.  .  .  . 

The  systematic  depravation  of  the  un- 
derlying Greek  is  nothing  else  but  a  poison- 
ing of  the  River  of  Life  at  its  sacred  source. 
Our  Revisers  (with  the  best  and  purest 
intentions,  no  doubt)  stand  convicted  of 
having  deliberately  rejected  the  words  of 
inspiration  in  every  page.  .  .  . 

Of  the  five  oldest  Greek  manuscripts  on 
which  the  Revisers  relied,  called  by  scholars 
for  sake  of  reference  Aleph  A  B  C  D,  the  Dean 
writes  that  they 

are    among    the    most    corrupt    documents  . 
extant.     Each  of  these  codices  (Aleph  B  D) 
clearly  exhibits  a  fabricated  text — is  the  re- 
sult of  arbitrary  and  reckless  recension.  .  .  . 


English  Work  165 

The  two  most  weighty  of  these  codices, 
Aleph  and  B,  he  likens  to  the  "two  false  wit- 
nesses" of  Matt,  xxvi.,  60.  Of  these  two  I  have 
supplied  my  readers  with  facsimiles  (see  pp. 
9  and  48). 

But  it  is  on  Bishop  Ellicott  that  he  empties 
out  the  vials  of  his  wrath  in  such  terms  as  the 
following : 

You,  my  Lord  Bishop,  who  have  never 
gone  deeply  into  the  subject,  repose  simply 
on  prejudice.  Never  having  at  any  time 
collated  codices  Aleph  A  B  C  D  for  your- 
self, you  are  unable  to  gainsay  a  single  state- 
ment of  mine  by  a  counter-appeal  to  facts. 
Your  textual  learning  proves  to  have  been  all 
obtained  at  second-hand.  .  .  . 

Did  you  ever  take  the  trouble  to  collate  a 
sacred  MS.?  If  yon  ever  did,  pray  with 
what  did  you  make  your  collation?  ... 

You  flout  me:  you  scold  me:  you  lecture 
me.  But  I  do  not  find  that  you  ever 
answer  me.  You  reproduce  the  theory  of 
Drs.  Westcott  and  Hort — which  I  claim  to 
have  demolished.  .  .  .  Denunciation,  my 
Lord  Bishop,  is  not  argument;  neither  is 
reiteration  proof.  .  .  . 

Not  only  have  you,  on  countless  oc- 
casions, thrust  out  words,  clauses,  entire 
sentences,  of  genuine  Scripture,  but  you 
have  been  careful  that  no  trace  shall  sur- 
vive of  the  fatal  injury  which  you  have 
inflicted.  I  wonder  you  were  not  afraid. 
Can  I  be  wrong  in  deeming  such  a  proceed- 


1 66  New  Testament  Criticism 

ing  in  a  high  degree  sinful?  Has  not  the 
SPIRIT  pronounced  a  tremendous  doom 
against  those  who  do  such  things  (Rev. 
xxii.,  19)  ? 

The  Revisers  had  admitted  among  their 
number  a  learned  Unitarian  minister,  Dr.  G. 
Vance  Smith.  This,  writes  Burgon,  is,  "it 
seems  to  me,  nothing  else  but  an  insult  to  our 
Divine  Master  and  a  wrong  to  the  Church." 
Of  the  marginal  note  set  by  the  Revisers  against 
Romans  ix.,  5,  he  complains  that  it  is  " a  Socinian 
gloss  gratuitously  thrust  into  the  margin  of 
every  Englishman's  New  Testament." 

Poor  Dean  Farrar  escapes  with  an  expression 
of  contempt  for  his  "hysterical  remarks." 

Nevertheless,  in  his  saner  moments  Burgon 
entertained  a  very  just  ideal  of  textual  critic- 
ism, and  in  the  same  volume  from  which  I  have 
made  the  above  quotations  he  writes  (p.  125) 
as  follows: 

The  fundamental  principles  of  the  science 
of  textual  criticism  are  not  yet  apprehended. 
.  .  .  Let  a  generation  of  students  give 
themselves  entirely  up  to  this  neglected 
branch  of  sacred  science.  Let  500  more 
copies  of  the  Gospels.  Acts,  and  Epistles  be 
diligently  collated.  Let  at  least  100  of  the 
ancient  Lectionaries  be  very  exactly  collated 
also.  Let  the  most  important  versions  be 
edited  afresh,  and  let  the  languages  in 


English  Work  167 

which  these  are  written  be  for  the  first 
time  really  mastered  by  Englishmen.  Above 
all,  let  the  Fathers  be  called  upon  to  give  up 
their  precious  secrets.  Let  their  writings  be 
ransacked  and  indexed,  and  (where  needful) 
let  the  MSS.  of  their  works  be  diligently 
inspected,  in  order  that  we  may  know  what 
actually  is  the  evidence  which  they  afford. 
Only  so  will  it  ever  be  possible  to  obtain  a 
Greek  text  on  which  absolute  reliance  may 
be  placed,  and  which  may  serve  as  the  basis 
for  a  satisfactory  revision  of  our  Authorised 
Version. 

It  is  a  curious  indication  of  the  muddle  into 
which  theological  arriere  pensee  can  get  other- 
wise honest  men  that  almost  in  the  same  breath 
Burgon  could  prejudge  the  question  at  issue 
and  write  as  follows  (Feb.  21,  1887)  to  Lord 
Cranbrook : 

You  will  understand  then  that,  in  brief, 
my  object  is  to  vindicate  the  Traditional 
Text  of  the  New  Testament  against  all  its 
past  and  present  assailants,  and  to  establish 
it  on  such  a  basis  of  security  that  it  may  be 
incapable  of  being  effectually  disturbed  any 
more.  I  propose  myself  to  lay  down  logi- 
cal principles,  and  to  demonstrate  that  men 
have  been  going  wrong  for  the  last  fifty 
years,  and  to  explain  how  this  has  come  to 
pass  in  every  instance,  and  to  get  them  to 
admit  their  error.  At  least,  I  will  con- 
vince every  fair  person  that  the  truth  is 


1 68  New  Testament  Criticism 

what  I  say  it  is — viz.,  that  in  nine  cases  out 
of  ten  the  commonly  received  text  is  the  true 
one. 

There  was  some  ground  then  for  the  gibe  that 
Burgon's  one  aim  was  to  canonise  the  mis- 
prints of  a  sixteenth-century  printer.  He  was, 
in  fact,  upholding  a  paradox;  he  would  not — 
perhaps  could  not,  so  dense  was  the  veil  of 
prejudice  with  which  the  old  theory  of  inspira- 
tion covered  his  eyes — see  that  prior  to  the 
collection  of  the  gospels  in  a  canon,  about  the 
year  180,  and  while  they  were  still  circulating 
singly  in  isolated  churches,  their  text  was  less 
fixed  and  more  liable  to  changes,  doctrinal  and 
transcriptional,  than  they  ever  were  afterwards; 
and  that  the  ultimate  text,  if  there  ever  was  one 
that  deserves  to  be  so  called,  is  for  ever  ir- 
recoverable. The  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  his 
bias  for  the  Received,  or  rather  Vulgar,  text 
was,  as  might  be  expected,  provided  by  him- 
self. The  passage  is  so  picturesque  as  to  merit 
to  be  cited  in  its  integrity: 

I  request  that  the  clock  of  history  may 
be  put  back  1700  years.  This  is  A.D.  183, 
if  you  please;  and — indulge  me  in  the 
supposition! — you  and  I  are  walking  in 
Alexandria.  We  have  reached  the  house  of 
one  Clemens,  a  learned  Athenian  who  has 
long  been  a  resident  here.  Let  us  step  into 
his  library — he  is  from  home.  What  a 
queer  place!  See,  he  has  been  reading  his 


English  Work  169 

Bible,  which  is  open  at  St.  Mark  x.  Is  it 
not  a  well-used  copy?  It  must  be  at  least 
fifty  or  sixty  years  old.  Well,  but  suppose 
only  thirty  or  forty.  It  was  executed, 
therefore,  within  fifty  years  of  the  death  of 
St.  John  the  Evangelist.  Come,  let  us  trans- 
cribe two  of  the  columns  (aeXiBeq)  as  faith- 
fully as  we  possibly  can,  and  be  off.  .  .  . 
We  are  back  in  England  again,  and  the 
clock  has  been  put  right.  Now  let  us  sit 
down  and  examine  our  curiosity  at  leisure. 
...  It  proves  on  inspection  to  be  a  tran- 
script of  the  fifteen  verses  (ver.  17  to  ver.  31) 
which  relate  to  the  coming  of  the  rich  young 
ruler  to  our  Lord. 

We  make  a  surprising  discovery.  ...  // 
is  impossible  to  produce  a  fouler  exhibition 
of  St.  Mark  x.y  17-31  than  is  contained  in  a 
document  older  than  either  B.  or  Aleph — it- 
self the  property  of  one  of  the  most  famous  of 
the  ante-Nicene  Fathers.  .  .  .  The  foulness  of 
a  text  which  must  have  been  penned  within 
seventy  or  eighty  years  of  the  death  of  the  last 
of  the  Evangelists  is  a  matter  of  fact,  which 
must  be  loyally  accepted  and  made  the  best  of. 

The  Revised  Version,  as  any  one  will  have 
noticed  who  has  compared  it  with  the  old 
authorised  texts,  omits  an  enormous  number  of 
passages,  some  of  which  were  of  great  beauty 
and  pathos.  Accordingly  Dean  Goulburn,  Bur- 
gon's  friend,  partisan,  and  biographer,  writes 
(Life  of  J.  W.  Burgon,  ii.,  213)  thus: — 

Are  not  these  three  passages  alone — the 


170          New  Testament  Criticism 

record  of  the  agony,  the  record  of  the  first 
saying  on  the  cross,  and  the  doxology  of  the 
Lord's  Prayer — passages  of  such  value  as  to 
make  it  wrong  and  cruel  to  shake  the  faith 
of  ordinary  Bible  readers  in  them? 


Here  is  a  pragmatist  argument  indeed.  Truth 
is  to  be  sacrificed  to  efficiency  in  practical 
working.  In  the  same  temper  Canon  Liddon 
had  written  to  Burgon  lamenting  that  the  Re- 
vision had  been  conducted  more  as  if  it  were  a 
literary  enterprise  than  a  religious  one.  Neither 
Burgon  nor  his  friends  seem  to  have  had  any 
idea  that,  by  issuing  a  translation  that  is  not  as 
exact  a  representation  as  possible  of  the  oldest 
and  most  authentic  texts  procurable,  you  com- 
mit in  the  field  of  religion  the  same  sort  of 
crime  as  a  forger  does  in  the  commercial  world 
by  uttering  base  coin  or  flash  bank-notes.  No 
Jesuits  were  ever  more  tortuous  in  their  methods. 

In  his  Introduction  to  the  First  Three  Gospels 
(Berlin,  1905,  p.  6),  J.  Wellhausen  sums  up 
Burgon's  position  by  saying  that  the  further  the 
manuscript  tradition  stretches  back,  the  worse 
it  becomes.  Grey  hairs,  he  laconically  adds, 
cannot  always  save  a  divine  from  making  a 
fool  of  himself.1  Even  admirers  of  Burgon 
had.  their  misgivings  roused  by  such  outbursts 

1  "Richtig  ist  aller dings,  dass  Alter  nicht  vof  Thorheit 
schiitzt." 


English  Work  171 

as  the  one  I  have  cited.  If  water  choked  them, 
what  had  they  left  to  drink?  If  the  two  most 
ancient  of  our  uncial  codices,  Vaticanus  B  and 
the  Sinaitic  Aleph,  are  false  witnesses  against 
Christ,  and  if  our  oldest  ascertainable  texts  of 
the  second  century  excel  in  "foulness,"  then 
what  corruptions  may  not  lurk  in  later  texts, 
time  and  the  mechanical  errors  of  scribes  being 
the  sole  factors  in  change  which  the  orthodox 
would  allow?  There  is  no  doubt  that  such  ver- 
dicts from  one  so  indisputably  orthodox  and 
learned  as  the  Dean  of  Chichester  helped  to 
unsettle  the  minds  of  the  clergy  and  educated 
laymen  and  that  they  prepared  the  way  for 
the  outspoken  criticisms  of  the  Encyclopedia 
Biblica. 

A  tendency  has  long  been  visible  in  the 
Anglican  Communion  to  lighten  the  ship  by 
jettisoning  the  books  of  Moses;  and  the  most 
recent  results  (we  write  in  1910)  of  New  Testa- 
ment textual  criticism  have  still  further  under- 
mined faith.  The  old  bulldog-like  confidence 
of  Burgon  and  Liddon  is  seldom  shown  to-day. 
Mr.  Robert  Anderson,  one  of  the  few  whose 
robust  orthodoxy  is  still  proof  against  any  and 
all  reasoning  in  these  domains,  justly  states  the 
position  of  the  Lux  Mundi  school  as  follows: 

The    Bible    is     not     infallible,     but     the 
Church  is  infallible,  and  upon  the  authority 


172  New  Testament  Criticism 

of  the  Church  our  faith  can  find  a  sure 
foundation.  But  how  do  we  know  that 
the  Church  is  to  be  trusted?  The  ready 
answer  is,  We  know  it  upon  the  authority 
of  the  Bible.  That  is  to  say,  we  trust  the 
Bible  on  the  authority  of  the  Church,  and 
we  trust  the  Church  on  the  authority  of  the 
Bible.  It  is  a  bad  case  of  "the  confidence 
trick "  (The  Silence  of  God,  1898,  p.  92). 

It  remains  to  be  seen  whether  in  the  century 
on  the  threshold  of  which  we  stand  the  authority 
of  the  thaumaturgic  priest  will  survive  that  of 
the  Bible;  and  whether  the  critics,  having  finally 
discredited  the  New  Testament,  will  not  turn 
their  bulls'-eyes  on  to  the  history  of  the  Church 
and  Sacraments.  In  this  task  they  will  have 
a  powerful  ally  in  the  new  sciences  of  compara- 
tive religion  and  anthropology,  just  as  they 
may  have  a  relentless  enemy  in  an  electorate  in 
which  women  may  command  a  clear  majority  of 
votes.  It  has  been  said  that  Christianity  began 
with  women  and  will  end  with  them.  It  is 
certainly  the  case  that  they  are  more  easily 
imposed  upon  by  priests  than  are  men,  more 
attracted  by  pomp  of  vestments,  by  music, 
lights,  incense,  auricular  confession,  and  magic 
of  sacraments,  less  prone  to  ask  about  any 
doctrine  or  ceremony  presented  to  them  under 
the  rubric  of  faith  and  religion  the  questions: 
Is  it  true?  On  what  evidence  does  it  repose? 


English  Work  173 

Has  it   any   rational   meaning,    any  historical 
basis  ? 

This  dissatisfaction  with  the  Bible  as  a  stand- 
ard of  faith  is  beginning  also  to  be  felt  in  the 
Latin  Communion;  and  is  really  voiced  by  the 
distinguished  Oxford  Catholic,  Father  Joseph 
Rickaby,  whom  I  have  already  had  occasion 
to  cite,  in  the  following  passage1: 

In  the  Gospels  and  Acts  we  do  not  pos- 
sess one  tenth  of  the  evidence  that  carried 
conviction  to  Dionysius  on  the  Areopagus, 
and  to  Apollos  at  Ephesus.  We  are  still 
beset  with  the  old  Protestant  Article,  that 
everything  worth  a  Christian's  knowing  was 
put  down  in  black  and  white  once  and  for 
all  in  the  pages  of  the  New  Testament. 

In  the  sequel  he  declares  that  "the  glad  tid- 
ings" which  travelled  "by  word  of  mouth'' 
from  Peter  and  John  and  Paul  to  their  dis- 
ciples, and  from  these  "through  all  genera- 
tions"— that  these  "have  not  dried  up  into 
parchments;  they  are  something  over  and  above 
the  Codex  Sinaiticus ."  He  admits  that  "the 
written  narratives  of  the  New  Testament  are 
difficult  to  harmonise,  and  leave  strange  gaps 
and  lacunas";  but  he  is  not  distressed  by  that, 
and,  much  as  "he  believes  in  the  Word  of  the 
Gospel  . .  .  still  more  does  he  believe  in  the  word 

1  P.  143  of  the  volume  Jesus  or  Christ?  London,  1909. 


174          New  Testament  Criticism 

of  the  Church. "  It  is  a  pity  that  he  does  not 
specify  in  what  particulars  the  Church's  un- 
written tradition  supplements  the  gaps  and 
lacunae  of  the  New  Testament,  or  reconciles  the 
many  contradictions  of  its  narratives.  We  seem 
to  read  between  his  lines  this,  that  he  is  ready 
to  let  the  critics  have  their  way  with  the  written 
records  of  his  religion,  if  only  the  Church  can 
be  held  together  in  some  other  way,  her  rites 
and  sacraments  guaranteed,  and  the  sacerdotal- 
ist  positions  secured.  It  is  probable  that  the 
Church  can  provide  a  canon  of  lead  more  pliable 
than  the  cast-iron  rule  of  the  letter.  This  eccle- 
siastic, we  feel,  is  well  on  his  way  to  become  a 
modernist  as  far  as  the  Scriptures  are  concerned. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  MODERNISTS 

RECENT  encyclicals  of  Pope  Pius  X.  speak 
of  the  Modernists  as  if  they  formed  a  close 
sect ;  yet  on  closer  inspection  they  are  seen  to  be 
detached  workers  in  various  fields — in  literature, 
like  Fogazzaro;  in  philosophy  and  religion,  like 
Father  Tyrrell  and  Baron  von  Hugel;  in  He- 
brew philosophy,  like  Minocchi;  in  Assyriology, 
Hebrew,  and  New  Testament  exegesis,  like 
Alfred  Loisy;  in  Church  history,  like  Albert 
Houtin.  All  of  them  good  Catholics,  and  only 
desirous  of  remaining  members  of  their  Church, 
they  were  only  united  in  their  desire  to  raise  its 
scholarship  and  thinking  to  a  modern  critical 
level.  Loisy  was  born  1857,  and  already  as  a 
young  man  made  himself  a  name.  He  held 
the  Chair  of  Assyriology  and  Hebrew  in  the 
Catholic  Institute  of  Paris  till  1892,  when  he 
was  deprived,  because  he  was  too  much  of  a 
scholar  and  a  gentleman  to  stoop  to  the  forced 
explanations  and  artificial  combinations  of  a 
Vigouroux.  He  then  took  up  the  study  of  the 
175 


176          New  Testament  Criticism 

New  Testament,  but  continued  to  lecture  at  the 
School  of  Higher  Studies  on  Biblical  Exegesis, 
drawing  large  audiences,  largely  composed  of 
clerics.  These  lectures  he  ceased  in  March, 
1904,  at  the  instance  of  the  Pope.  In  1903  he 
followed  up  his  little  book,  The  Gospel  and  the 
Church,  which  had  given  much  offence,  with 
an  ample  commentary  on  the  fourth  gospel, 
in  which  he  pulverised  the  old  view  of  its  apos- 
tolic authorship.  The  Papal  Biblical  Commis- 
sioners alluded  to  above  were  interrogated  about 
it,  and  issued  an  absurd  counterblast.  Loisy's 
great  commentary,  in  two  volumes,  on  the 
Synoptic  gospels  followed  in  the  spring  of  1907, 
just  before  a  Papal  bull  of  major  excommunica- 
tion declared  him  to  be  a  homo  vitandus  qui  ab 
omnibus  vitari  debet — "a  man  to  be  avoided, 
whom  every  one  is  bound  to  avoid."  A  Latin 
Bishop  in  Great  Britain  publishing  such  a  docu- 
ment would  render  himself  liable  to  imprison- 
ment for  malicious  libel.  Except,  however, 
that  his  charwoman  gave  him  notice  and  left, 
Loisy  sustained  no  harm,  for  the  Pope's  spiritual 
weapons  are  almost  as  antiquated  as  the  old 
muskets  I  have  seen  in  the  hands  of  his  Swiss 
guards.  In  the  following  year  Loisy  was 
chosen  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History  in 
the  University  of  Paris,  in  succession  to  the  late- 
lamented  Jean  Reville,  the  author  of  exhaustive 
works  on  the  early  history  of  the  Episcopate 


The  Modernists  177 

and  on  the  fourth  gospel.  Not  content  with  the 
magnificent  advertisement  of  excommunica- 
tion, the  Pope  supplied  another,  yet  ampler, 
by  issuing  in  July,  1907,  an  encyclical  (be- 
ginning Lamentabili  sane  exitu)  in  which  were 
condemned  sixty-five  theses  drawn,  or  sup- 
posed by  the  Pope  and  his  inquisitors  to  be 
drawn,  from  Loisy's  works.  Though  in  these 
theses  Loisy's  conclusions  are  often  falsified  or 
exaggerated,  they  are,  on  the  whole,  an  apt 
summary  of  the  most  recent  and  assured  re- 
sults of  criticism;  and  their  dissemination  must 
have  damaged  the  cause  of  the  Modernists 
about  as  much  as  a  formal  condemnation  of 
Euclid's  axioms  would  damage  geometricians. 
The  following  are  some  of  the  propositions  con- 
demned : 

15.  The  gospels,  until  the  canon  was  defined 
and  fixed,  were  amplified  by  continual  additions 
and     corrections.     There     survived    in     them, 
therefore,  only  tenuous  and  uncertain  vestiges 
of  Christ's  teaching. 

1 6.  The  narratives  of  John  are  not,  properly 
speaking,  history,  but  a  mystical  envisagement 
of  the   gospel.     The   discourses  in  it  are  theo- 
logical meditations  on  the  mystery  of  salvation 
devoid  of  historical  truth. 

21.  The  Revelation,  which  forms  the  object 
of  Catholic  faith,  was  not  completed  with  the 
ApostleSo 


178  New  Testament  Criticism 

22.  The  dogmas  which  the  Church  regards 
as  revealed  are  not  truths  fallen  from  heaven, 
but  a  sort  of  interpretation  of  religious  facts  at 
which  the  human  mind  arrived  by  laborious 
efforts . 

27.  The  divinity  of  Jesus  Christ  cannot  be 
proved  from  the  gospels;  it  is  a  dogma  deduced 
by  the  Christian  conscience  from  the  notion 
of  the  Messiah. 

30.  In  all  the  gospel  texts  the  name  Son  of 
God  is  equivalent  only  to  the  title  Messiah;  it 
in  no  way  signified  that  Christ  was  the  true 
and  natural  son  of  God. 

31.  The  teaching  about  Christ  handed  down 
by    Paul,    John,    and    the    Councils    of    Nice, 
Ephesus,    and    Chalcedon    is    not    that    which 
Jesus   taught,    but   only   what   Christians   had 
come  to  think  about  Jesus. 

32.  The  natural  sense  of  the  gospel  texts 
cannot  be  reconciled  with  what  our  theologians 
teach    about    the    consciousness    and    infallible 
knowledge  of  Jesus  Christ. 

33.  It  is  evident  to  any  one  not  led  away  by 
his  prejudices  either  that  Jesus  taught  an  error 
about  the  immediate  advent  of  the  Messiah,  or 
that  the  greater  part  of  his  teaching  as  contained 
in  the  Synoptic  gospels  is  unauthentic. 

34.  Criticism    cannot    attribute    to    Christ 
knowledge  without  bounds  or  limit,  except  on 
the  hypothesis,   inconceivable  historically  and 


The  Modernists  179 

repugnant  to  modern  feeling,  that  Christ  as 
man  possessed  God's  knowledge,  and  yet  was 
unwilling  to  communicate  a  knowledge  of  so 
many  things  to  his  disciples  and  to  posterity. 

35.  Christ  was  not  from  the  first  conscious 
of  being  the  Messiah. 

37.  Faith   in   Christ's  resurrection   was,   to 
begin    with,    less    a    belief   in    the    fact    itself 
than  in  his  being  immortal  and  alive  in  God's 
presence. 

38.  The  doctrine  of  the  expiatory  death  of 
Christ  is  not  in  the  gospels,  but  was  originated 
by  Paul  alone. 

43.  The  custom  of  conferring  baptism  on 
infants  was  part  of  an  evolution  of  discipline 
which  eventually  led  to  this  sacrament  being 
resolved  into  two — viz.,  Baptism  and  Penance. 

45.  In  Paul's  account  of  the  institution  of 
the  Eucharist  (i  Cor.,  xi.  23-25)  we  must  not 
take  everything  historically. 

49.  As  the  Christian  Supper  little  by  little 
assumed  the  character  of  a  liturgical  action,  so 
those  who  were  accustomed  to  preside  at  it 
acquired  a  sacerdotal  character. 

51.  Marriage  could  become  a  sacrament  of 
the  New  Law  only  fairly  late  in  the  Church,  etc. 

52.  It  was  foreign  to  the  mind  of  Christ  to 
set  up  a  Church  as  a  society  which  was  to  endure 
through   long    ages    upon    the    earth.     On    the 
contrary,    he   imagined   that   the   Kingdom   of 


i8o          New  Testament  Criticism 

Heaven  and  the  end  of  the  world  were  both 
equally  imminent. 

55.  Simon  Peter  never  dreamed  of  primacy 
in  the  Church  having  been  conferred  on  him  by 
Christ. 

56.  The  promotion  of  the  Roman  Church  to 
be  head  of  other  Churches  was  due  to  no  ar- 
rangements of   Divine  Providence,  but  purely 
to  political  conditions. 

60.  Christian  teaching  was  Jewish  to  begin 
with,  though  by  successive  evolutions  it  after- 
wards became,  first  Pauline,  then  Johannine, 
and  finally  Hellenic  and  universal. 

65.  Modern  Catholicism  can  compound  with 
genuine  science  only  by  transforming  itself  into 
a  sort  of  undogmatic  Christianity — that  is, 
into  a  broad  and  liberal  Protestantism. 

Needless  to  say,  these  principles  are  largely 
exemplified  in  the  lives  and  writings  of  our 
younger  English  clergy;  and  Professor  Sanday, 
in  his  latest  work  on  Christologies,  declares 
that  we  must  modernise,  whether  we  will  or  no. 
He  accordingly  argues  that  the  division  in 
Jesus  between  the  Divine  and  Human  was  not 
vertical,  as  the  Fathers  imagined,  so  that  his 
waking  actions  and  thoughts  could  be  appor- 
tioned now  to  one,  now  to  the  other  class.  It 
was  rather  horizontal,  his  divine  consciousness 
being  only  subliminal,  and  all  the  rest  of  him 
purely  human.  So  I  find  that,  as  M.  Jourdain 


The  Modernists  181 

had  all  his  life  been  talking  prose  without  know- 
ing it,  I  have  been  believing  all  along  in  an  in- 
carnation which  Jesus  at  best  shared  with  his 
fellow-men.  But  to  be  quite  serious:  this  view 
hardly  does  justice  to  the  mind  and  character  of 
Jesus,  even  in  the  eyes  of  those  who  deny  that 
he  was  in  any  way  unique  among  men.  For 
the  subliminal  self  is  no  better  than  a  store- 
house of  past  experiences  and  memories,  some 
of  them  possibly  ante-natal,  of  the  individual; 
and  it  is  chiefly  revealed  under  abnormal  and 
diseased  cerebral  conditions.  At  best  it  is  a 
stepping-stone  of  the  dead  self  on  which  "to 
rise  to  higher  things."  Aloral  achievements  and 
character  imply  more,  and  are  the  work  of  a 
creative  will  generating  new  results  that  never 
pre-existed  in  any  form ;  and  we  enter  an  impasse 
if  we  try  to  explain  conscious  experiences  and 
efforts  of  will  as  the  mere  unwinding  of  a  coiled 
spring,  as  the  unfolding  of  an  eternal  order 
already  implicit  in  things.  For  in  the  spiritual 
domain  the  past  does  not  wholly  contain  the 
future;  and  no  moral  or  speculative  end  is 
served  by  trying  to  deduce  our  lives  from 
ulterior  spiritual  beings  or  agencies.  If  all  holy 
thoughts  and  good  counsels  proceed  from  a  be- 
ing called  God,  whence  did  he  derive  them? 
Why  should  they  not  be  as  ultimate  and  original 
in  us,  who  certainly  possess  them,  as  in  this 
hypothetically  constituted  author  of  them? 


1 82  New  Testament  Criticism 

No  doubt  on  such  a  view  the  burden  of  human 
responsibility  becomes  greater,  but  it  is  not 
insupportable.  The  rule,  Ex  nihilo  nihil  fit, 
holds  good  only  in  the  phenomenal  world  of 
matter,  and  perhaps  not  absolutely  there;  and 
the  idea  that  so  much  of  revelation  as  there  was 
in  Jesus,  or  as  there  is  in  any  of  us,  must  needs 
flow  from  some  ulterior  source  outside  or  before 
us  is  an  illegitimate  extension  of  this  rule  to 
the  spiritual  sphere.  Furthermore,  we  feel 
that,  if  Dr.  Sanday  had  not  to  buttress  up  the 
dogma  of  the  two  natures  in  Christ,  he  would  not 
venture  on  these  excursions  into  modern  philo- 
sophy. Now,  it  is  certain  that  the  Fathers  of 
the  Church  did  not  mean  by  their  formulas  what 
Professor  Sanday  tries  to  make  them  mean. 
What,  then,  is  the  use  of  clinging  to  forms  of 
words  which  we  can  no  longer  take  in  the  sense 
to  express  which  they  were  devised?  And  the 
same  criticism  applies  to  Dr.  Gore's  explanation 
of  the  incarnation  as  a  kenosis  or  self-emptying 
by  Jesus  Christ  of  his  divine  nature,  as  a 
laying-aside  of  his  cosmic  role  and  attri- 
butes in  order  to  be  born  a  son  of  woman. 
Dr.  Gore  himself  allows  that  no  Father  or 
teacher  of  the  Church,  from  Irenaeus  down  to 
his  friend  the  late  Professor  Bright  of  Oxford, 
would  have  tolerated  his  explanation.  Surely, 
then,  it  would  be  better  to  give  up  alto- 
gether a  form  of  words  which  he  can  no 


The  Modernists  183 

longer  accept  in  the  sense  in  which  they  were 
framed. 

And  the  same  reflection  must  have  crossed 
the  minds  of  many  of  the  readers  of  Dr.  Sanday's 
work  (already  cited)  on  Christologies  Ancient 
and  Modern  when  they  reached  the  passage  of 
it  in  which  he  crowns  a  life  of  continuous  in- 
tellectual growth,  of  ceaseless  endeavour  to 
understand  others  and  give  them  their  due,  of 
perpetual  and  sincere,  if  cautious,  acceptance 
of  Truth  as  she  has  unveiled  herself  to  his 
eyes,  with  the  declaration  that  he  repeats  a  creed 
"not  as  an  individual,  but  as  a  member  of  the 
Church."  He  does  "not  feel  that  he  is  re- 
sponsible for"  the  creeds  and  "tacitly  corrects 
the  defects  of  expression,  because  he  believes 
that  the  Church  would  correct  them  if  it  could." 
He  sums  the  matter  up  in  the  words: 

For  the  creed  as  it  stands  the  Church  is 
responsible,  and  not  I.  ...  I  myself  regard 
the  creeds,  from  this  most  individual  and 
personal  point  of  view,  as  great  outstanding 
historical  monuments  of  the  Faith  of  the 
Church.  As  such  I  cannot  but  look  upon 
them  with  veneration.  .  .  .  But,  at  the  same 
time,  I  cannot  forget  that  the  critical  mo- 
ments in  the  composition  of  the  creeds  were  in 
the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries,  and  that  they 
have  never  been  revised  or  corrected  since. 

As  we  read  these  words  of  Dr.  Sanday,  we 


1 84  New  Testament  Criticism 

realise  what  an  advance  has  taken  place  in  the 
last  thirty  years,  and  that  the  day  is  not  far 
off  when  Christian  records  wilt  be  frankly 
treated  like  any  other  ancient  text,  and  the 
gospel  narratives  taken  into  general  history 
to  be  sifted  and  criticised  according  to  the  same 
methods  and  in  the  same  impartial  temper  which 
we  bring  to  the  study  of  all  other  documents. 
La  verite  est  en  marche. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[In  the  following  bibliography  I  confine  myself  almost 
entirely  to  works  of  the  last  ten  years.  It  is  disconcerting 
to  have  to  name  so  few  English  books;  but,  as  in  earlier 
decades,  so  in  this,  the  majority  of  English  works  bearing 
on  the  criticism  of  the  Gospels  are  merely  apologetic,  and 
deserve  little  notice  as  works  of  learning. — F.  C.  C.] 

Abbott,  Rev.  Edwin  A.     All  his  works. 

Bacon,  Dr.  B.  W.  The  Fourth  Gospel  in  Research  and 
Debate.  New  York,  1910. 

—     The  Beginnings  of  Gospel  Story.     Yale,  1909. 

Bigg,  Canon  Ch.  Wayside  Sketches  in  Ecclesiastical 
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Blass,  Prof.  F.  Grammar  of  New  Testament  Greek. 
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Bousset,  Prof.  Dr.  W.  Hauptprobleme  der  Gnosis. 
1907. 

Burkitt,  Prof.  F.  C.  Evangelion  da-Mepharreshe. 
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Carpenter,  Principal  Estlin.     The  First  Three  Gospels. 

Charles,  Rev.  R.  H.     Eschatology.    'London,  1899. 

Criticism  of  the  New  Testament.  St.  Margaret's  Lec- 
tures. 1902. 

Deissmann,  Adolf.      Light  from  the  Ancient  East.     1910. 

Dobschiitz,  E.  von.  The  Apostolic  Age.  (Translated 
by  Pogson.)  London,  1910. 

Drummond,  James.  Studies  in  Christian  Doctrine. 
London.  1909. 


1 86  New  Testament  Criticism 

Encyclopedia  Biblica.     Four  vols. 

Gardner,  Prof.  Percy.  The  Growth  of  Christianity.  Lon- 
don, 1907. 

A  Historic  View  of  the  New  Testament.     1901. 

Gore,   Rev.    C.    H.     Dissertations   on   the  Incarnation. 

London,  1895. 

Gregory,  Dr.  C.  R.  Canon  and  Text  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment.  Edinburgh,  1907. 

Text  kritik  des  Neue$  Testamentes.     Three  vols. 

Leipzig,  1902-1909. 

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mentes.    Leipzig,  1908. 

Canon  and  Text  of  the  New  Testament.  Edinburgh. 

Harnack,  A.     Luke  the  Physician.      (Translated  by  J. 

R.  Wilkinson.)  1907. 

The  Sayings  of  Jesus.     1908. 

Harris,  J.  Rendell.  Side-lights  on  New  Testament 
Research.  1909. 

Hastings,  James.     Encyclopedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics. 

A  Dictionary  of  the  Bible. 

Houtin,  Albert.  La  Question  Biblique  au  XIXe  Siecle. 
Paris,  1902.  And  La  Q.  B.  auXXe  Siecle.  Paris,  1906. 

The  International  Critical  Commentary.  T.  &  T.  Clark, 
Edinburgh. 

Jowett,  Benjamin.     Epistles  of  St.  Paul. 

Julicher,  Adolf.  An  Introduction  to  the  New  Testa- 
ment. (Translated  by  J.  P.  Ward.)  London,  1904. 

Knopf,  R.     Der  Text  des  Neues  Testamentes.     1906. 

Kiibel,  Johannes.  Geschichte  des  Katholischen  Modern- 
ismus.  Tubingen,  1909. 

Lake,  Prof.  Kirsopp.  The  Historical  Evidence  for  the 
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Lietzmann,    Hans.     Handbuch   zum    Neuen    Testament. 

(In  this  series  are  contained  Prof.  Dr.  Paul  Wendland's 


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Loisy,  Alfred.     Les  Evangiles  Synoptiques.     1907. 

—  Le  Quatrieme  Rvangile.     Paris,   1903. 

The  Gospel  and  the  Church.  (Translated  by 
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Macan,  R  .W.  The  Resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ.  Edin- 
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McGiffert,  A.  C.  The  Apostles1  Creed.  New  York, 
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Martineau,  James.  The  Seat  of  Authority  in  Religion. 
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Pfleiderer,  Dr.  Otto.  The  Early  Christian  Conception 
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Robinson,  Dr.  J.  A.,  Dean  of  Westminster.  The  Study 
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INDEX 


ABBOTT,  Rev.  E.  A.,  his  Synopticon 153,  154 

Acta  Sanctorum,  growth  of  legends  in,  compared 

with  the  Gospels 74 

Alford,  Dean,  on  harmonising  of  Scripture 24,  31, 

35,  66,  67,  70 
Anderson,  Sir  Robert,  on  the  Lux  Mundi,  38;  on 

Sacerdotalistic  substitutes  for  the  Bible 171  ff. 

Ataraxia,  Stoic  ideal  of,  applied  to  Jesus 76 

BAUR,  F.  C.,  his  life  and  work 128  ff. 

Bengel,  on  the  Three  Witnesses 95 

Burgon,   Dean  of  Chichester.  his  attacks  on  the 

Revised  Version  of  the  Gospels 163  ff. 

CATHARS,  on  New  Testament  miracles 63 

Chase,  Rev.  Dr.,  Bishop  of  Ely,  on  Matt,  xxviii,  19  100, 

101 

Chillingworth,  on  Popes 42 

Collins,  Anthony,  on  Prophecy 49  ff. 

Conybeare,  John,  his  reply  to  Tindal 43 

Creighton,  Bishop  of  London 125 

DAVIDSON,  Dr.,  on  Matt,  xxviii,  19 99 

Deistic  movement 39 

Diatessaron  of  Tatian 87 

.    j 

ERASMUS 93 

Eschatology  of  Gospels,  Strauss  on 138 

Eusebian  reading  of  Matt,  xxviii,  19 99 

Evanson,  E.,  on  The  Dissonance  of  the  Evangelists.  .  115  ff. 
189 


Index 


PAGE 

FARRAR,  late  Dean  of  Canterbury,  17 ;  Life  of  Christ, 

1 06;  on  Reimarus 115 

Female  suffrage  tends  to  an  obscurantist  regime.  . .        172 

GIBBON,  on  the  Three  Witnesses 94 

Gibson,    Bishop    of    London,    suppresses    Tindal's 

works 44 

Gore,  Rev.  Ch.,  on  the  Kenosis 182 

Gospels,  their  compilation 25 

Goulburn,  Dean,  on  Revised  Version 169 

Green,  J.  R.,  and  Stubbs,  anecdote  of 44 

Gregory,  Dr.  C.  R.,  on  New  Testament  text 101 

Greswell's  Harmony  of  Gospels 30,  31 

Grotius,  on  harmonisings  of  Gospels. 36 

HARNACK,  Prof.,  on  Matt,  xxviii,  19 99 

Herder,  J.  G 104  if. 

Hurd,  Bishop  of  Lichfield,  favours  Evanson 116 

INSPIRATION  of  Scripture,  how  regarded  by  Origen, 
II  ff. ;  by  the  Reformers,  20  ff. ;  by  William  Whis- 
ton,  21 ;  by  Alford,  24,  26,  33;  by  Greswell,  30  ff.; 
by  Dr.  Sanday,  36,  37;  by  Sir  R.  Anderson,  38; 
by  John  Locke,  40;  by  Jeremy  Taylor 41 

Irenaeus  on  the  Four  Gospels,  88;  on  Johannine 

authorship  of  the  Fourth  Gospel 78,  79 

JEROME'S  revision  of  Latin  Bible 1 8 

Jesus,  his   Deification  begins  in   First   and   Third 

Gospels 76 

LACHMANN,  on  priority  of  Mark,  154;  rejected  the 

Textus  Receptus 1 60 

Lardner,  on  Oral  Tradition 151, 152 

Leo  XIII.,  on  the  Three  Witnesses 96 

Liddon,   Canon,   on   Book  of   Daniel  and   Fourth 

Gospel,  80;  on  Revised  Version 170 

Lightfoot's  answer  to  Supernatural  Religion 155  ff. 

Locke,  on  Inspiration 40 

Loisy,  Alfred,  protected  by  Leo  XIII.,  96;  on  dog- 
matic changes  in  New  Testament  text,  102;  ex- 
communicated by  Pius  X 176 


Index  191 


Luther,  on  authority  of  Church  tradition 103 

Lux  Mundi  Sermons 38 

MARK'S  Gospel  used  by  Matthew  and  Luke... 25  ff.,67,  68 

Martin,  David,  on  I  John  v.,  7  and  8 93 

Martineau,  Dr.  James,  on  Matt,  xxviii,  19 99 

Matthew's  Gospel  the  work  of  an  unknown  com- 
piler, 68;  not  a  version  of  the  Hebrew  Logia  at- 
tested by  Papias 77 

Millennial  belief  in  early  Church 87 

Modernists,  and  Pius  X.,  103;  who  and  what 175 

NESTLE,  Dr.  Eberhard,  his  edition  of  New  Testa- 
ment   99, 1 02 

ORAL  tradition  in  Gospels,  hypothesis  of,  rejected 
by  James  Smith,  150;  adopted  by  Lardner  and 
Davidson 151,152 

PAPAL  Encyclicals  against  Modernists 175  ff. 

Papias  on  Logia,  77,  78;  his  lost  Diegeseis,  79;  testi- 
mony regarding  Gospels  of  Matthew  and  Mark  155 

Pius  X.,  his  summary  of  Modernist  opinions 177  ff. 

Person's  work  on  the  Three  Witnesses 95 

Priestley,  his  controversy  with  Horsley,  123;  criti- 
cises Evanson 125 

Priscillian's  text  of  the  Three  Witnesses 92 

Prophetic  Gnosis  in  New  Testament 45  ff- 

REIMARUS 108  ff. 

Renan's  life  and  works 144  ff. 

Revised  Version 162  ff. 

Rickaby,  Father  Joseph,  on  progress  of  criticism, 

65;  on  tradition  outside  the  New  Testament.  ...  173 
Robinson,  Dr.  J.  Armitage,  Dean  of  Westminster 

on  composition  of  Synoptic  Gospels  68  ff.,  71,  77; 

on  the  Fourth  Gospel 81  ff. 

Rushbrooke's  Synopticon 153,  154 

SALMON,  Rev.  Dr.,  on  Westcott  and  Hort 89 

San  day, -Professor,  on  Fourth  Gospel,  138;  on  mod- 
ernising, 180;  on  creeds. 183 


I 92  Index 

PAGE 

Sandius,  on  i  John  v.,  7  and  8 93 

Schleiermacher,  on  Mark 143 

Schweitzer,  Albert,  on  Reimarus,  io8;his  work,  Von 

Reimarus  zu  Wrede 127 

Seventy  disciples,  invented  by  Luke 24  ff. 

Simon's  Histoire  Critique 93 

Smith,  Dr.  G.  Vance,  assailed  by  Dr.  Burgon 166 

Smith,  James,  of  Jordanhill,  on  the  Gospels,  69  ff . ; 

on  oral  tradition 149  ff . 

Socinians 39 

Stephen,  Leslie,  on  the  Deists,  51,  63;  on  Priestley. .  124 
Strauss,  his  Leben  Jesu,  134,   135,   149;  on   escha- 

tology  of  Jesus 139 

Stubbs,  Bishop  of  Oxford,  his  attitude  towards  Re- 
nan,  44;  his  uncritical  attitude 124 

Supernatural  Religion,  controverted  by  Dr.  Light- 
foot 155  ff- 

TAYLOR,  Jeremy,  on  Inspiration 41 

Text  of  Gospels  in  flux  till  it  was  canonised 150 

Textus  Receptus,  history  of  the  term 158  ff. 

Thompson,  Rev.  J.  M.,  on  Fourth  Gospel 138 

Three  Witnesses,  text  of  the 93  ff. 

Tindal's  Christianity  as  Old  as  the  Creation 40 

Travis,  Archdeacon,  on  the  Three  Witnesses 94 

Trinitarian  falsifications  of  New  Testament 91  ff. 

VOLTAIRE  and  the  English  Deists 61 

WEISS,  Johannes 142 

Wellhausen  on  Dean  Burgon 170 

Westcott  and  Hort,  defects  of  their  system  of  New 

Testament  criticism 89  ff. 

Whiston,  William,  his  Harmony 21  ff. 

Woolston,  Thomas,  on  the  miracles  of  the  New 

Testament 54  ff. 

XIMENES,  Cardinal,  his  Greco-Latin  Bible 92 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

^[  Hitherto  there  have  been  few,  if  any, 
really  popular  works  touching  the  historical 
growth  of  the  various  great  branches  of 
knowledge.  The  ordinary  primer  leaves 
unexploited  the  deep  human  interest  which 
belongs  to  the  sciences  as  contributing  to 
progress  and  civilization,  and  calling  into 
play  the  faculties  of  many  of  the  finest 
minds.  Something  more  attractive  is 
wanted. 

^[  The  above  need  in  literature  has  now 
been  met.  Each  volume  in  The  History 
of  Sciences  is  written  by  an  expert  in  the 
given  subject,  and  by  one  who  has  studied 
the  history  as  well  as  the  conclusions  of 
his  own  branch  of  science.  The  mono- 
graphs deal  briefly  with  the  myths  or 
fallacies  which  preceded  the  development 
of  the  given  science,  or  include  biographical 
data  of  the  great  discoverers.  Consider- 
ation is  given  to  the  social  and  political 
conditions  and  to  the  attitudes  of  rulers 

Q.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

and  statesmen  in  furthering  or  in  hindering 
the  progress  of  the  given  science.  The 
volumes  record  the  important  practical 
application  of  the  given  science  to  the 
arts  and  life  of  civilized  mankind,  and 
also  contain  a  carefully-edited  bibliography 
of  the  subject.  Each  volume  contains  from 
twelve  to  sixteen  carefully-prepared  illus- 
trations, including  portraits  of  celebrated 
discoverers,  many  from  originals  not  hither- 
to reproduced,  and  explanatory  views  and 
diagrams.  The  series  as  planned  should 
cover  in  outline  the  whole  sphere  of  human 
knowledge. 

*[[  Science  is  to  be  viewed  as  a  product 
of  human  endeavor  and  mental  discipline, 
rather  than  taken  in  its  purely  objective 
reference  to  facts.  The  essential  purpose 
has  been  to  present  as  far  as  practicable 
the  historical  origins  of  important  dis- 
coveries, also  to  indicate  the  practical 
utility  of  the  sciences  to  human  life. 

G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


A  History  of  the  Sciences 

Each  volume  is  adequately  illustrated,  attractively  printed, 
and  substantially  bound. 
i6mo.    Each,  net^  75  cents.  By  mail,  85  cents.    12  illustrations 

History  of  Astronomy 

By  George  Forbes,  M.A.,  F.R.S.,  M.Inst.  C.E. 

Formerly  Professor  of  Natural  Philosophy,  Anderson's 
College,  Glasgow 

I  thank  you  for  the  copy  of  Forbes's  History  of  Astonomy 
received.  I  have  run  it  over,  and  think  it  very  good  indeed. 
The  plan  seems  excellent,  and  I  would  say  the  same  of  your 
general  plan  of  a  series  of  brief  histories  of  the  various 
branches  of  science.  The  time  appears  to  be  ripe  for  such  a 
series,  and  if  all  the  contributions  are  as  good  as  Prof. 
Forbes's,  the  book  will  deserve  a  wide  circulation,  and  will 
prove  very  useful  to  a  large  class  of  readers. — Extract  from  a 
letter  received  from  Garrett  P.  Serviss,  B.  S. 

History  of  Chemistry 

By  Sir  Edward  Thorpe,  C.B.,  LL.D.,  F.R.S. 

Author   of    "Essays    in   Historical    Chemistry,"    ••  Humphry 
Davy:  Poet  and  Philosopher,"  "Joseph  Priestley,"  etc. 

12  illustrations.      Two  vols.      Vol.  I — circa  2000  B.  C.  to  1850 

A.D.   Vol.  11—1850  A.D.  to  date 

The  author  traces  the  evolution  of  intellectual  thought  in 
the  progress  of  chemical  investigation,  recognizing  the  various 
points  of  view  of  the  different  ages,  giving  due  credit  even  to 
the  ancients.  It  has  been  necessary  to  curtail  many  parts  of 
the  History,  to  lay  before  the  reader  in  unlimited  space 
enough  about  each  age  to  illustrate  its  tone  and  spirit,  the 
ideals  of  the  workers,  the  gradual  addition  of  new  points  of 
view  and  of  new  means  of  investigation. 

The  History  of  Old  Testament 
Criticism 

By  Archibald  Duff 

Professor  of  Hebrew  and  Old  Testament  Theology  in  the  United 
College,  Bradford 

The  author  sets  forth  the  critical  views  of  the  Hebrews  con- 
cerning their  own  literature,  the  early  Christian  treatment  of 
the  Old  Testament,  criticism  by  the  Jewish  rabbis,  and  criti- 
cism from  Spinoza  to  Astruc,  and  from  Astruc  until  the  present. 


The  History  of  Anthropology. 

By  A.  C.  HADDON,  M.A.,  Sc.D.,  F.R.S.,  Lecturer  in 
Ethnology,  Cambridge  and  London. 

In  Preparation 

The  History  of  Geography. 

By  Dr.  JOHN  SCOTT  KELTIE,  F.R.G.S.,  F.S.A.,  Hon. 
Mem.  Geographical  Societies  of  Paris,  Berlin,  Rome, 
Brussels,  Amsterdam,  Geneva,  etc. 

The  History  of  Geology. 

By  HORACE  B.  WOODWARD,  F.R.S.,  F.G.S.,  Assistant 
Director  of  Geological  Survey  of  England  and  Wales. 

The  History  of  New  Testament  Criticism. 

By  F.  C.  CONYBEARE,  M.A.,  late  Fellow  and  Praelector  of 
Univ.  Coll.,  Oxford ;  Fellow  of  the  British  Academy; 
Doctor  of  Theology,  honoris  causa,  of  Giessen ;  Officer 
d'Academie. 

Further  volumes  are  in  plan  on  the  following 
subjects: 

Mathematics  and  Mechanics— Molecular  Physics, 
Heat,  Light,  and  Electricity — Human  Physiology, 
Embryology,  and  Heredity — Acoustics,  Harmonics, 
and  the  Physiology  of  Hearing,  together  with  Optics, 
Chromatics,  and  Physiology  of  Seeing — Psychology, 
Analytic,  Comparative,  and  Experimental — Sociology 
and  Economics — Ethics — Comparative  Philology — 
Criticism,  Historical  Research,  and  Legends— Com- 
parative Mythology  and  the  Science  of  Religions— 
The  Criticism  of  Ecclesiastical  Institutions — Culture, 
Moral  and  Intellectual,  as  Reflected  in  Imaginative 
Literature  and  in  the  Fine  Arts — Logic— Philosophy 
— Education. 

New  York     Q.  P.  Putnam's  SOHS     London 


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